In Gratitude: Ajaan Suwat

Today we’ve come together to think about Ajaan Suwat, the person who founded this monastery. In two days’ time, it’s going to be twenty years since he passed away. So, we’ve come to think about all that we owe to him.

He could have stayed on in Thailand. His teacher was the teacher of the king. After his teacher passed away—his teacher was Ajaan Funn—Ajaan Suwat was responsible first for the funeral, which was a royal state funeral, and then for the building of a museum and memorial to Ajaan Funn, again sponsored by the king. He was involved with a lot of senior monks in Bangkok, government officials, officials from the palace, as well as the royal family. When that was over, he wanted to find a place where he could just go off and be by himself for a while.

He had a friend in Bangkok, a monk at one of the monasteries there, who had just started a monastery here in America, up in Seattle. So he invited Ajaan Suwat to come and spend a couple months there. Ajaan Suwat came here and began to see the difficulties that Thai people were having in getting good monks to come. So he decided to stay on.

As a result, people in Thailand began to wonder about him, because most of the monks who came here to America had a bad reputation. They came here to escape the Vinaya. It got to the point that one time when Ajaan Suwat was back in Thailand during the winter, he was visiting Ajaan Maha Bua. Ajaan Maha Bua decided to give him an opportunity to let people know that what he was doing here was in line with Vinaya. His way of giving him the opportunity was to say in front of a lot of people, “So I understand you’re there in America driving your own car and fixing your own food.” Ajaan Suwat’s reply was, “Well, there may be some monks who are doing that, but you can be confident that your students wouldn’t do anything like that.”

Another time, the king invited Ajaan Suwat to the palace for a meal. Then he asked him, “Why are you staying on in America? Why don’t you come back and help the Thai people? If Westerners want to study the Dhamma, they can come here to Thailand easily.” Ajaan Suwat’s response was, “I’m not there for the Westerners. I’m there for the Thais who don’t have anybody to depend on.”

Of course, as he came here, he began to see that it was not just the Thais who needed the Dhamma—it was everybody. Which is why he ended up founding Wat Metta. After several years in, basically being in suburban homes, he finally had a place out in the country. As he said, this was going to be a place where everybody could come and practice, no matter what their background, no matter what their language, no matter what their nationality. This was the place where we weren’t going to be holding any one particular country’s customs. As our standard, we’re going to be holding the customs of the noble ones.

This was a principle he had learned from Ajaan Mun. As he said, this was one of Ajaan Mun’s favorite Dhamma themes: following the customs of the noble ones. Ajaan Mun himself had been criticized as he was taking on the ascetic practices, trying to follow the Vinaya as strictly as possible. He was deviating from a lot of things that had become customary in Thailand and Laos. When people commented on this to him, he said, “The customs of the people in Thailand or Laos or any country in the world are the customs of people with defilements. If you want to get past your own defilements, you have to follow the customs of those who already have gotten past their defilements, in other words, the noble ones. So we follow the customs of the noble ones.”

Those are the custom of being content with our food, clothing, and lodging; the custom of delighting in abandoning unskillful qualities; the custom of delighting in developing skillful qualities. If you stick with these, then you’ve got the Dhamma that’s appropriate for everybody, no matter where they’re from. So we’ve tried to maintain that principle here as well.

When the monastery was first started, we had lots of Westerners coming here saying, “Now that you’re here in America, you have to do things the American way.” But the American way seemed to be at odds with a lot of things we were doing. As long as Ajaan Suwat stood by the customs of the noble ones, as he said, we’re not trying to impose Asian customs on anybody here. We’re trying to make the customs of the noble ones available.

In the years after he left, again, people would come and request changes. And as I told them, “We’re here, physically far away from my teachers in Thailand. The only way I feel close to them is by following what they taught me. If you had me change from that, then I’d be far away, both in body and mind**. L**ike an uprooted plant, I’d die.”

So I’ve held by that principle following Ajaan Suwat’s example. And that’s what’s enabled us to make a place where everybody can come and practice, as long as they’re really serious about doing the practice. As he said another time, “We’re not here to get other people. We’re here to get ourselves. And that requires holding closely to the Dhamma and the Vinaya. If other people see what we’re doing and like what we’re doing, and they want to come and join us, we’re happy to have them join us. But we’re not going to sacrifice ourselves in order to get others.”

There was another statement he liked to make, which was that “With all the people in the world, there’s really only one person, and that’s ourself. What he meant, of course, was that there’s only one person that you can truly be responsible for. Even if you have children, you can’t be responsible for their actions 100 percent. Especially as they grow older, they get more and more independent in their thinking.

But you can be responsible for your own actions. The problem is that most people are not. They’re more concerned about what other people are doing, and their own actions get left to whatever defilements may come up in their mind. So you have to be very careful to make sure that your actions stay in line with the Dhamma. That’s your responsibility.

There was a logo in Thailand that appeared about the time when Wat Metta was founded. It said in Thai, “Yaa hen kae tua.” It could be translated as, “Don’t be self-centered.” But as Ajaan Suwat said, “That’s not in line with what the Buddha taught. The Buddha said you’ve got to be self-centered, but in a wise way. You’re not self-centered in being selfish, but you are self-centered in realizing that the big problem in life is the problem of the suffering that you’re causing yourself.”

So you’ve got to focus there, inside yourself. Straighten out things inside yourself. Make that your center. Once the center inside is straightened out, then you have time for others.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you’re not generous in the meantime. Part of straightening out yourself inside means that you have to overcome your stinginess, your lack of generosity. It also means that you have to get rid of any activities that would break the precepts. So, as you’re being self-centered in this way, you’re actually helping a lot of other people in the meantime. But the main focus is right here, where you’re responsible. As long as you don’t lose your focus, then you’re practicing in line with the customs of the noble ones.

This connects with another teaching that Ajaan Suwat got from Ajaan Mun. As he said, this is one of Ajaan Mun’s favorite topics was practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. In other words, you have to change yourself to be in line with the Dhamma. You don’t try to change the Dhamma to be in line with your own defilements.

If we stick by the Dhamma in this way, it’s as if we’re on a main road. This is the Buddha’s own example. You follow the noble eightfold path, the way he taught it. It’s as if you’re on a major highway. It’s smooth. It’s safe. If you leave this path, it’s like going off on a rough path into the forest, up the hills and down.

If you’re on a cart, which is what you had back in those days, you finally get to the point where the axle breaks, the wheels break, and then you’re stuck. But if you stay on the major highway, you’re safe. And it’ll take you to where you want to go—to the end of suffering.

There’s no other path that can guarantee that.

So we want to follow the path that’s been tested again and again and again for more than 2,600 years. As long as we stick by these principles, we’re on the safe path. We can be confident that someday we’re going to get where we want to go.