Delight in Stillness

It’s twenty-one years now since Ajaan Suwat passed away, April 5th, 2002. It’s always good to reflect on the person who founded the place where we’re meditating, and at the very least have some gratitude for the fact that he made it possible for us to meditate here, to practice here. He saw the need of a place we could be out in the wilderness with a lot of seclusion, where people of all nationalities, as he said, and all languages could come.

He was in his seventies at the time. He could have rested on his past accomplishments, staying at any one of the several monasteries he had founded. Instead, he wanted to found one more, one that was more in line with his idea of what a really good place would be.

When you’re young, you don’t appreciate how difficult it is, as you get older, to do things like this. It’s good to stop and think that he made a lot of sacrifices for this place. So we should be willing to make some sacrifices in our practice.

One of the themes that he liked to talk about a lot—as he said, it’s one the themes that Ajaan Mun would talk about frequently—was practicing in line with the customs of the noble ones.

There are two places in the texts that refer to this. One is in the Canon, in the passage we chanted last night—being content with food, clothing, shelter, as you get it, and also being very careful not to pride yourself over the fact that you’re content with these things.

I do know some monks who do without, and they have some very strong criticisms of monks who live more luxuriously—but that’s not the point of living simply. It’s to look at your own defilements. That relates to the fourth of the customs of the noble ones, which is to delight in abandoning and to delight in developing. This is a reference to one of the Buddha’s categorical teachings, which is to delight in developing skillful qualities and to delight in abandoning unskillful ones.

It’s important that we learn how to take delight in these things, because if we don’t delight in the path, our delight is going to go someplace else. So you have to see that it’s a good thing when you can recognize some craving that’s leading you in the direction of suffering and you can say No and you can make it stick—at least for a while.

Or you can delight in getting the mind to settle down. Ajaan Suwat was one of the few teachers I know who stayed with Ajaan Mun and mentioned that Ajaan Mun would talk about jhana. I don’t know why the other ones don’t talk about that. There was one time, when Ajaan Suwat was a very young monk, that he went to stay with Ajaan Mun for the first time. He found himself one morning one-on-one with Ajaan Mun. He didn’t know what to say. So he asked if Ajaan Mun had slept well that night before. Ajaan Mun said, “When someone has attained jhana, you don’t have to worry about sleeping well.” So Ajaan Suwat would talk a lot about that—getting the mind secluded from unskillful qualities, secluded from sensuality, getting it to settle down. So learn how to delight in that. Delight in the effort.

We delight in it when the effort goes well. When the effort doesn’t go well, we don’t usually delight in it, but still, we should delight in the fact that we have the opportunity to keep working at this—delight in trying to figure out, when the mind is not settling down, what the obstacle is—because the obstacle is what we’re looking for. As Ajaan Suwat commented one time, that’s the suffering the Buddha’s talking about. You don’t have to look elsewhere, anywhere far away for the suffering of the four noble truths. Right there, where the mind is disturbing itself, that’s suffering. You want to figure out why: What’s the craving that’s getting in the way? What are you clinging to?

So do your best to get the mind to settle down. Find the greatest point of stillness in the body and stay there. Connect with it and keep your gaze as steady and as still as you can. Then see what disturbs it. It can be either a physical disturbance or a mental disturbance. But ask yourself, “What are you holding on to?” Keep questioning the disturbances in the mind. In that way, you’re developing both insight and tranquility at the same time.

It’s like that passage in the Canon where the Buddha talks about getting the mind to settle down and appreciating the fact that, once it settles down, it’s empty of a lot of the disturbances that would come, first, with being entangled with other people and then as you settle down even more, the disturbances that come from nature.

Say, you’re somewhere out under the trees. It’s pretty quiet, but there are still some disturbances there: the sounds of the different animals going through the leaves, the sounds coming from far off. If you allow yourself to get disturbed by them, then you’ve got a problem. Why are you disturbed by them? Ajaan Chah’s comment is really good there. He says, “It’s not that the sounds are disturbing you. You’re disturbing the sounds.” So what are you doing that’s making the sound an issue?—aside from the fact that we don’t want the sound of the helicopter to be in the recording.

The Buddha recommends that when you’re out in the wilderness and the perceptions of wilderness are your only disturbance, you think of earth. Your body has the earth element in it, the things around you have the earth element. If you’re just earth with earth, there’s not much to disturb things. So just stay with that perception.

Then appreciate that you’re free from a lot of the disturbances that were there before. But as you stay, you find that there’s still some disturbance there—you’ll want to go to the perception of space, which is even less disturbed than the perception of earth. You can follow this process all the way through all the different formless states.

The important thing, though, is that the disturbance is not coming from outside. It’s coming from within.

So, as you get the mind more and more still, more and more quiet, appreciate the quiet, appreciate the stillness, because that enables you to delight in the fact that you’re getting the mind to settle down. Then see what disturbance is left. You peel things away like this. That’s one of the approaches the Buddha recommends for gaining awakening.

So learn to delight in the fact that you have this opportunity and you’re engaged in something really good. That was another one of Ajaan Suwat’s favorite comments. At the very beginning of the evening meditation, he’d often say, “Come to this with a sense of being inspired by what you’re doing.” “This is high-level work,” he’d say, “training the mind, bringing it to stillness, bringing it to insight. Have a sense of confidence, conviction, inspiration that you’re involved in something really good. Whether the results are quick or slow, the work itself is good.”

Learn how to delight in that, and it’ll help you get through a lot of barren patches in the practice—because there will be barren patches. It’s not the case that everything develops smoothly and continuously. But have a good sense of conviction that you’re on the right path—and that whether the progress is fast or slow, you want to stay on the path. If you find yourself wandering off, just get right back—because the delight of being here is food so that you can keep on going.