Against Your Type
June 22, 2008
There’s a passage in The Craft of the Heart, which is one of Ajaan Lee’s first books, where he talks about six different personality types—in Thai the word is carit; in Pali, carita. There’s the passion type, the aversion type, the delusion type, the intellectual type, the gullible type, and the worrying type. In listing these types, Ajaan Lee is obviously uncomfortable with them. He treats them because they were in the standard Dhamma textbooks that had been disseminated all over Thailand by that time, and which in turn were based on the commentaries. In fact, one of his reasons for writing The Craft of the Heart was to take a lot of the teachings from the Dhamma textbooks and treat them from the point of view of the forest tradition.