Write It Down in Your Heart

There’s a sutta where the Buddha talks about three kinds of discernment: what he calls “overturned discernment,” “lap discernment,” and “wide-open discernment.” He’s referring to the way people listen to Dhamma talks.

A person of overturned discernment, he says, is like a pot that’s been turned upside down. You pour water on the pot, but the pot’s not going to collect anything. In the same way, some people listen to Dhamma talks but don’t really pay attention. Nothing even goes in, much less stays in the mind. In the Buddha’s terms, they don’t attend to the talk. Attending is more than just listening, or lending ear. It means thinking about the talk in terms of, “How does this apply to me, especially my problem of suffering?”

The person of lap discernment listens to the talk, pays attention, asks those questions, but then, when he gets up from the talk, doesn’t pay attention to it anymore. He just drops it, like a person who has a lap full of seeds. As long as he’s sitting down, the seeds are there in his lap. But when he gets up, the seeds scatter.

Finally, the person of wide-open discernment is someone who listens well to the talk, attends to it, asks those questions, and then, after he gets up, he continues thinking about the talk, attending to it, asking questions: “How does this apply?”

You listen to these descriptions, and you also listen to the other ways the Buddha talks about how you should ideally listen to a talk— listening single-mindedly, paying appropriate attention—and then you compare all that with what you’ve heard about the ajaans saying that when you’re meditating while listening to a talk, let the talk have five percent of your attention, but give ninety-five percent of your attention to the breath or whatever your meditation topic is.

Their idea is that if something the teacher is saying is actually applicable to what you’re doing right now, it’ll come right into your awareness without your having to send your attention outside. Otherwise, stay focused inside.

So, the question is, Why the difference?

Part of the difference, of course, is that the ajaans would be giving talks to large groups of people, and if they had a topic where they knew that some people should listen to the topic and other people shouldn’t, then they would say before the talk, “Don’t send your attention outside.”

For example, there are some people who are spending too much time with other people and not enough time focused on their own meditation. But there are other people who are not spending enough time with people outside. In this case, the ajaan would want to make sure that the right people listen to the right part of the talk,

In Ajaan Chah’s image, you see some people going off to the right side of the road, so you say, “Go left, go left.” Other people are going off the left side of the road, so you tell them, “Go right, go right.” If the wrong people listen to the instructions, people going off to the right will go further to the right and get lost in the bushes off the side of the road. The same with the people going too far to the left.

So this is a case where you have to attend properly. When you hear something in a Dhamma talk, how does this really apply to you? Does it apply to you? This is going to require some discernment. This is why the Buddha talks about this as an issue of discernment: how you attend to a talk.

You may sense that the speaker is not always talking to you directly; he may be talking to someone else in the room. But you have to be honest about that. There were some cases where Ajaan Fuang was directly critical of one of the monks in the monastery. Later on in the night, I would hear the monk say, “Well, he wasn’t really talking about me. He was talking indirectly about somebody else there.” In that way, the monk became impervious to instruction.

So you do want to take the instructions to heart, and you want to attend appropriately: “How does this talk apply to me? How does this talk apply to the question of suffering? What am I doing that’s causing suffering that I didn’t notice before, but now the talk is pointing out? Or how might I perfect the path in ways that I hadn’t thought of before?”

This is one of the reasons why, when you hear the Dhamma of the ajaans, you always have to take into account the fact that they’re talking to a particular group of people with particular problems. There’s the possibility that their problems might be the same as yours, or they might not be the same as yours.

All too often we hear it said that a particular ajaan will have one theme that he applies all the time, and another ajaan will have another theme that he applies all the time.

But if you read widely, say, in Ajaan Lee, Ajaan Chah, or Ajaan MahaBua, you realize that their instructions deal with all kinds of different problems, and their approaches will often surprise you.

Ajaan Chah, for instance, is supposed to be a teacher who taught nothing but “Let go, let go.” At least that’s the popular perception. But there was one time when he was invited to the palace. There was an issue at the time between the students of the universities in Bangkok and the army, and both sides were calling on the king to side with them.

Ajaan Chah had been invited for a meal along with two other senior ajaans. He was the junior member of the group. After the meal, the king came and talked to the ajaans, asking for their advice. The first two monks said, “You should practice equanimity.” When it came Ajaan Chah’s turn, he said, “Well, you do have to be equanimous, but you have to be equanimous with wisdom.” In other words, it’s not just a case of letting go.

Ajaan MahaBua was famous for being strict, talking about going out and just punching out the defilements. But he had his subtleties, and the people who lived with him said he was extremely kind.

As for Ajaan Lee, when you look at his Dhamma talks, you can see that he sometimes is sharp, sometimes seems avuncular. There’s a wide variety in the teachings of the various ajaans.

Ajaan Fuang liked to point out the fact that Ajaan Lee’s writings were among the few that were actually meant to be used across the board. What that means is that he wrote treatises dealing with basic principles. Whereas his Dhamma talks were meant for specific people at specific times.

What’s interesting, though, is that in translation Ajaan Lee works much better in his Dhamma talks. There’s something more appealing about his Dhamma talks than his treatises.

But the treatises are important. They give you a basic framework. Once you’ve got the framework, you can figure out which talk belongs in which spot in the framework: “This talk belongs here, this talk applies to this problem in my meditation, that one applies to another problem in my meditation, this one doesn’t apply to anything in my meditation right now, but maybe someday it will.”

So you have to be discerning. It’s always a good default mode that when you listen to the talk, the first question is, “Does this apply to me? How does this apply to me? How does this apply to the problem of suffering?”

When you listen with that attitude, combined, as the Buddha said, with respect for yourself, respect for the Dhamma, respect for the speaker, then you benefit.

This, of course, is assuming that the speaker is responsible and has respect for the Dhamma as well. When both sides show respect like this, then there’s real communication, worthwhile communication.

Otherwise, the speaker is just a babysitter in the background, making sure that the babies in the room don’t go wandering off in their thoughts to places they shouldn’t go. Hopefully, the talk actually gives information that’s useful, that’s worth taking to heart, worth attending to well. Not only while you’re listening, but also after you’ve gotten up: Reflect on what you’ve heard.

We live in a society where the recordings are available all the time, and there are good search engines. But the search engines have their limitations, and you want to compensate for them by developing a good memory. This is one of the ways in which we develop mindfulness, the ability to keep things in mind.

Traditionally, that was how it was done. People were taught to memorize and they got good at developing mindfulness in their meditation. That way, when they picked up a piece of information, it stayed with them. They didn’t have to go searching on their phones, searching on their iPads. It was there.

Ajaan Uthai talks about one time when he was staying with Ajaan Funn. Ajaan Suwat, who was also a student of Ajaan Funn, had just come back from southern Thailand. On the way back, he had stopped off at Wat Asokaram. He had noticed that there was a nun who was taking notes of the Ajaan Lee’s Dhamma talks.

He thought that it would be good to take notes of Ajaan Funn’s Dhamma talks, because otherwise the talks would just disappear into the air. So he took a little notebook with him.

As Ajaan Funn was about to give the talk, he saw the notebook. He said, “I don’t want you to write things down in a notebook. I want you to write them down in your heart.”

This shows that the ajaans were not always saying, “Don’t pay attention to the talk. Let it just be in the background.” If there’s something that’s really worth listening to, worth remembering, remember it. Write it down in your heart, so that it’ll be right there when you need it.