Passing On the Dhamma

It was 39 years ago yesterday that Ajaan Fuang passed away. It was 39 years ago today that we got the news in Thailand. So with events like this, it’s always good to stop and think of what we owe to people who passed away and what we want to try to maintain. They did their best to bring the Dhamma this far, and then they left it with us. Now it’s our responsibility.

So what are we maintaining? What are we protecting? We should try to protect as much as we can.

The basic principle in the forest tradition is practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma—in other words, not in terms of your likes or dislikes, or preconceived notions you may bring to it. You want to try to bring the Dhamma into your heart and see what has to be moved around inside your heart for the Dhamma to fit. Rather than trying to lop off this piece here and this piece there so that it fits into the space you already have, you try to create a new space.

Remember: This is for your own good. And it’s important that you have a sense of joy in the practice. So as Ajaan Fuang would say, try to treat it as a game, but as a game you sincerely want to win. So you enjoy it as you look for the challenges and learn how to meet the challenges, overcome the difficulties. Find joy there: what the Buddha calls delighting in abandoning and delighting in developing.

Our problem is that we tend to delight in our defilements. He says to learn how to delight in abandoning them, which is the same as learning how to say No so that you can get past them. Think of the less-than-honorable things that appeal to you, things that would pull you in, and think about how good it would be to be able to say No to them and rise above them—and then actually to do what you can to rise above them.

That’s the kind of delight you want to find in the practice. It’s not an empty delight. It sounds like a delight in not doing, it sounds empty, but it’s not. You find that there’s a greater freedom that comes, a greater sense of spaciousness, a lightness that comes, as you can let go of these things that have been holding you down.

Then you realize that the Dhamma that’s been brought to us over the generations, over the centuries, is something that we want to pass on intact. We do that by practicing it intact, practicing the whole thing, so that people who come after us will have something good to pass on—and nothing will have been lost in the meantime.