Gratitude

It was 38 years ago today that Ajaan Fuang passed away. You may have noticed we’ve had a lot of death anniversaries over the past two months. This is the hot season in Thailand. It seems to be the killer season. But we commemorate the passing of the ajaans because of our gratitude. Without them, where would we be? We wouldn’t know anything about the practice. We wouldn’t have had examples, living examples, of the practice to encourage us. So then the question becomes: What living examples are we giving to others?

Our best way of showing our gratitude, of course, is to practice. But we’re not doing this to please anybody. We’re doing this, basically, to look after ourselves. Ajaan Fuang used to like to say that nobody hired us to be born; nobody hired us to practice. We’re here of our own free will, because we see the benefits that come from the practice.

At the same time, though, we realize that our efforts would be pretty much for nothing if we didn’t have a good basis, a good background, from the people who’ve been passing on the Buddha’s skill for all these thousands of years. So in that sense, we are doing it in honor of them and for the sake of the people who come after us. We want to keep this skill alive.

But the best way to keep it alive is to get as much benefit out of it as we can. Ajaan Lee made the comparison. He says it’s as if you may have a recipe for medicine. If you don’t make the medicine and take it, it’s just a recipe. It’s just a piece of paper with some words scribbled on it. All kinds of things can happen to a piece of paper that you don’t really protect. But if you see that you made the medicine and you got good results from taking it, then you’re going to take really good care of that piece of paper.

In the same way, we try to take good care of the Dhamma by not changing it and, at the same time, by putting it into practice as much as we can so that we’ll see the benefits and other people will see the benefits as well. This is how this skill has been passed on. It’s not automatic that it’s just going to stay here in the world forever. It requires people practicing it, seeing the results, both in those who have come before and the results in their own lives. That’s what keeps the Dhamma alive.

So have a strong sense of the value of what we owe to the people who came before us and that we’re carrying on their desires by putting the teachings into practice. After all, they didn’t teach us just for the sake of having nice words floating through the air. It was so that we would take those words into our hearts and realize that it is possible to reduce the amount of suffering we have, to even put an end to that suffering.

The real suffering is suffering we create. It’s something we’re responsible for, but we can also then be responsible for its end, with a strong sense that we’re fortunate we live in the world where the teachings for putting it to an end are still alive. You go out into the world outside, and there are a lot of people out there for whom, as far as they’re concerned, this world doesn’t have a Buddha—or it doesn’t mean much to them.

But if you realize that it means a lot, that there is someone who found a way to put an end to suffering through his own efforts, and he’s going to show us how, and we can do it, too, that changes the world for everybody who puts those teachings into practice.