Living in the World

§ “Ajaan Mun once said, ‘People are all alike, but not at all alike, but in the final analysis, all alike.’ You have to think about this for a good while before you can understand what he was getting at.”

§ “If you want to judge other people, judge them by their intentions.”

§ “When you want to teach other people to be good, you have to see how far their goodness can go. If you try to make them better than they can be, you’re the one who’s being stupid.”

§ “Nothing comes from focusing on the faults of others. You can get more done by looking at your own faults instead.”

§ “How good or bad other people are is their own business. Focus on your own business instead.”

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students complained to him about all the problems she was facing at work. She wanted to quit and live quietly by herself, but circumstances wouldn’t allow it, because she had to provide for her mother. Ajaan Fuang told her, “If you have to live with these things, then find out how to live in a way that rises above them. That’s the only way you’ll be able to survive.”

§ Advice for a student who was letting the pressure at work get her down: “When you do a job, don’t let the job do you.”

§ Another one of Ajaan Fuang’s students was having serious problems, both at home and in her work, so he appealed to her fighting spirit: “Anyone who’s a real, live person will have to meet up with real, live problems in life.”

§ “When you meet with obstacles, you have to put up a fight. If you give up easily, you’ll end up giving up all your life long.”

§ “Tell yourself you’re made out of heartwood, and not out of sapwood.”

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students — a young nurse — had to put up with being the brunt of a lot of gossip at work. At first she tried to ignore it, but as it happened more and more often, her patience began to wear thin.

One day, when the gossip was really getting to her, she went to meditate with Ajaan Fuang at Wat Makut. While meditating, she saw a vision of herself repeating back, back, back to infinity, as if she were caught between two parallel mirrors. The thought occurred to her that in her many previous lives she had probably had to endure an untold amount of the same sort of gossip, and this made her even more fed up with her situation. So when she left meditation she told Ajaan Fuang of how tired she was of being gossiped about. He tried to console her, saying, “This sort of thing is part and parcel of the world, you know. Where there’s praise, there also has to be criticism and gossip. When you know this, why let yourself get involved?”

Her mood was so strong, though, that she argued with him, “I’m not getting involved with them, Than Phaw. They come and get involved with me!”

So he turned the tables on her: “Then why don’t you ask yourself — who asked you to butt in and be born here in the first place?”

§ “If they say you’re no good, remind yourself that their words go only as far as their lips. They’ve never reached out and touched you at all.”

§ “Other people criticize us and then forget all about it, but we take it and keep thinking about it. It’s as if they spit out some food and we pick it up and eat it. When that’s the case, who’s being stupid?”

§ “Pretend you have stones weighing down your ears, so that you don’t get blown away by everything you hear said.”

§ One day Ajaan Fuang asked, as if out of the blue, “If your clothing fell down into a cesspool, would you pick it back up again?”

The woman he asked had no idea what he was getting at, but knew that if she wasn’t careful about answering his questions, she’d come out looking like a fool, so she hedged her answer: “It depends. If it was my only set of clothing, I’d have to pick it up. But if I had other sets, I’d probably let it go. What are you getting at, Than Phaw?”

“If you like to hear bad things about other people, then even though you have no part in the bad karma of their acts, you still pick up some of the stench.”

§ If any of his students were bearing a grudge about something, he would tell them: “You can’t even sacrifice something as minor as this? Think of it as making a gift. Remember how many valuable things the Buddha sacrificed during his life as Prince Vessantara, and then ask yourself, ‘This anger of mine has no value at all. Why can’t I sacrifice it, too?’”

§ “Think first before you act. Don’t be the sort of person who acts first and then has to think about it afterwards.”

§ “Beware of fall-in-the-well kindness: the cases where you want to help other people, but instead of your pulling them up, they pull you down.”

§ “When people say something is good, it’s their idea of good. But is it always what’s really good for you?”

§ “If people hate you, that’s when you’re let off the hook. You can come and go as you like without having to worry about whether or not they’ll miss you or get upset at your going. And you don’t have to bring any presents for them when you come back. You’re free to do as you like.”

§ “Trying to win out over other people brings nothing but animosity and bad karma. It’s better to win out over yourself.”

§ “Whatever you lose, let it be lost, but don’t ever lose heart.”

§ “If they take what’s yours, tell yourself that you’re making it a gift. Otherwise there will be no end to the animosity.”

§ “Their taking what’s yours is better than your taking what’s theirs.”

§ “If it’s really yours, it’ll have to stay with you, no matter what. If it’s not really yours, why get all worked up about it?”

§ “There’s nothing wrong with being poor on the outside, but make sure you’re not poor on the inside. Make yourself rich in generosity, virtue, and meditation — the treasures of the mind.”

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students complained to him, “I look at other people, and they seem to have such an easy life. Why is life so hard on me?” His answer: “Your ‘hard life’ is ten, twenty times ‘the good life’ for a lot of people. Why don’t you look at the people who have a harder time than you do?”

§ Sometimes when any of his students were facing hardships in life, Ajaan Fuang would teach them to remind themselves: “How can I blame anyone else? Nobody ever hired me to be born. I came of my own free will.”

§ “Everything that happens has its lifespan. It won’t last forever. When its lifespan is up, it’ll go away on its own.”

§ “To have a partner in life is to suffer. To have a good partner is really to suffer, because of all the attachment.”

§ “Sensual pleasure is like a drug: One taste and you get addicted. They say that with heroin it’s hard to break the habit, but this is even worse. It goes deep, right into the bone. It’s what made us get born in the first place, and has kept us circling through birth and death for aeons and aeons. There’s no medicine you can take to break the habit, to wash it out of your system, aside from the medicine of the Buddha’s teachings.”

§ “When we see Hindus worshiping Siva lingas it looks strange to us, but actually everyone in the world worships the Siva linga — i.e., they worship sex, simply that the Hindus are the only ones who are open about it. Sex is the creator of the world. The reason we’re all born is because we worship the Siva linga in our hearts.”

§ Once, when one of Ajaan Fuang’s students was being pressured by her parents to look for a husband so that she could settle down and have children, she asked him, “Is it true what they say, that a woman gains a lot of merit in having a child, in that she gives someone else the chance to be born?”

“If that were true,” he answered her, “then dogs would get gobs of merit, because they give birth to whole litters at a time.”

§ He also told her, “Getting married is no way to escape suffering. Actually, all you do is pile more suffering on yourself. The Buddha taught that the five khandhas are a heavy burden, but if you get married, all of a sudden you have ten to worry about, and then fifteen, and then twenty...”

§ “You have to be your own refuge. If you’re the sort that has to take refuge in other people, then you’ll have to see things the same way they do, which means you have to be stupid the same way they are. So pull yourself out of all that, and take a good look at yourself until things are clear within you.”

§ “You may think, ‘my child, my child,’ but is it really yours? Even your own body isn’t really yours.”

§ One of Ajaan Fuang’s students, when she was suffering a serious liver disease, dreamed that she had died and gone to heaven. She took this as a bad omen and so went to Wat Makut to tell her dream to Ajaan Fuang. He tried to console her, saying that it was really a good omen in disguise. If she survived the disease, she’d probably get a promotion at work. If she didn’t, she’d be reborn in good circumstances. As soon as he said this, though, she got very upset: “But I’m not ready to die!”

“Look,” he told her, “when the time comes to go, you have to be willing to go. Life isn’t a rubber band you can stretch out or shrink as you like.”

§ “If there are any sensual pleasures you really hunger for, it’s a sign you enjoyed them before in a previous life. That’s why you miss them so much this time around. If you think about this long enough, it should be enough to make you dispassionate and dismayed.”