Customs of the Noble Ones

Ajaan Suwat’s first teacher in the forest tradition was Ajaan Funn, who was a student of Ajaan Mun. Ajaan Funn kept telling Ajaan Suwat, “You’ve got to go study directly with Ajaan Mun.” At first, Ajaan Suwat didn’t see any need. He was perfectly satisfied with his teacher. But eventually, he did spend some time with Ajaan Mun. And he said he realized that Ajaan Mun was really special.

He commented that during his time there, the two Dhamma topics that Ajaan Mun stressed again and again were, one, practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma—that phrase comes from the Mahā Parinibbāna Sutta, when the Buddha describes the best way to pay homage to him. The second topic was the customs of the noble ones. These two teachings overlap, partially, in the sense that you practice the Dhamma not in line with your personal preferences, not in line with the preferences of your culture, but you practice the Dhamma as it is.

We tend to think of the forest tradition as being quintessentially Thai or Lao, but during Ajaan Mun’s life he was constantly attacked for not doing things in the Thai or the Lao way. His response was always that he wanted to become a noble one, and if you want to become a noble one, you have to practice in line with the customs of the noble ones, not in line with the customs of any one particular country, because the customs of the Thais and the Laos and every country in the world are the customs of people with defilements, aimed at keeping families going, keeping lay society going.

He’d say that society is domesticated, whereas the Dhamma is not. Remember, the Dhamma was found in the wilderness. The Buddha gained awakening in the wilderness. He passed away in the wilderness. He was able to bridge the gap between the wilderness and civilization, but his prime inspiration was out in the woods, away from the customs of people in general.

I remember when I first encountered the forest tradition, that was one of the first things that struck me. My first ordination had been at a village temple in Central Thailand, where I got a total immersion in Thai culture. After about a month there, someone took me out to stay with Ajaan Fuang. It was like stepping outside of Thai culture.

I had been in Thailand for two years at that point and I had a strong sense of what Thai values were. This, however, was definitely something outside. The buildings were plain and simple. But more importantly, the attitude was something that stood outside of Thai society. You might say that it was fundamentalist, in the sense that the forest tradition tried to get back to the original fundamentals of the Dhamma without all the cultural accretions that had been added to it over the centuries.

We hear so much about how Buddhism adapts itself to different cultures and that that’s part of the wisdom of Buddhism, being adaptable. But Buddhism doesn’t adapt. It gets adapted. It’s not always the case that adaptation, just because it’s successful in attracting a lot of people, is actually in line with the Dhamma.

Ajaan Mun’s vision was to get back to the original principles. You may say fundamentalism is bad, but it depends on the fundamentals. If the fundamentals are good—such as the four noble truths, the noble eightfold path, the four establishings of mindfulness—then fundamentalism is good. You’re putting aside greed and distress with reference to the world, you’re getting away from the world. You might say that it’s also counter-cultural. That’s what appealed to me, at least at the time, and the fundamentalism has appealed to me since then, too.

But this aspect of, say, the customs of the noble ones, being in line with the idea that you practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma: There’s a story in the commentary about how the Buddha, after gaining awakening, goes back home for a stay in his hometown. He goes out for alms his first morning there. His father finds out about this and is really upset. He goes out and berates the Buddha. “No one in our family lineage has ever gone for alms like this. This is disgraceful.”

But the Buddha tells him, “I no longer belong to that lineage. I belong to the lineage of the noble ones. This is one of their practices, this is one of their customs—going for alms, finding food in a harmless way, taking only the food that people readily give.”

That’s one sense of what it means to follow the customs of the noble ones, the customs that stand outside of the values of society and have a more solid basis in what’s really good and really true, and not just a cultural bias.

However, there’s a second meaning for the phrase, the customs of the noble ones, and that has to do with the discourse in the Canon. It’s not the family lineage of the noble ones. It’s a set of customs composed of four principles. The first three have to do with contentment: You’re content with the food you get, content with the clothing you get, content with the lodgings you get. As long as they’re good enough to practice, they’re good enough. You don’t struggle to find things that are better. And you’re very careful that you don’t pride yourself on your contentment. In other words, you don’t exalt yourself and disparage others over the idea that you’re more content than they are.

In other words, you have the proper attitude toward contentment. You practice it as a kind of medicine to treat the disease of your greed, and you don’t have to show-off to others. You use your material things, alive to the dangers of getting attached to them, but also alive to the dangers of exalting yourself over not being attached—a very circumspect attitude.

Knowing the four requisites, you might think that the fourth custom of the noble ones would have to do with medicines, but it doesn’t. The first three have to do with contentment. The last one has to do with *dis-*content.

The Buddha says that you delight in developing and delight in abandoning. In other words, you delight in developing skillful qualities and you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities. As the Buddha said, his search for awakening was to search for what was skillful, which meant he didn’t just sit around and be content with the fact that his mind had unskillful qualities. If they were there, he’d get them out.

The images he uses are not just sitting there watching things arising and allowing them to pass away on their own. He said that it was like a man whose head is on fire: He’d put out the fire as fast as possible. Or like the cowherd whose cows could get into the rice fields—if they show any tendency to get into the rice fields while the rice is still growing, he’d beat them back.

In other words, you very actively try to figure out why your unskillful qualities like greed, aversion, delusion, lust, or envy have their attractions, why they have their allure. You want to see what sparks them. You want to see how they come and how they go. They’re not permanent fixtures in the mind. When they come back, why do you go for them? What’s the allure? You have to dig down really deep to find that, because often they’ll try to do things that we ordinarily feel embarrassed about.

So you try to get rid of unskillful qualities, and then you develop ones that are skillful in their place, like mindfulness and concentration and discernment. When concentration comes, you don’t just say, “Here it comes and it’s going to go. It’s impermanent.” When it comes, you try to keep it from going. You try to develop it as far as you can. The same with all the factors of the path.

But this is where the discontent comes in. Obviously you’re discontent with the mind when it’s filled with unskillful qualities. But even with skillful qualities, the Buddha said you have to be discontent with them, until they take you all the way. This, he said, was the secret to his awakening—strong, relentless effort.

This doesn’t mean he was sweating all the time, beating himself up all the time, but there was a persistence. If things required delicate work, he would do the delicate work. If things required patience, if they took time to see and to understand, he would take the time to see and to understand. But he was constantly working on, “What could I do to improve the state of my mind?” This is discontent. This was what made him noble.

So contentment is not a blanket attitude that you take toward everything. It’s a matter of priorities. You don’t give much time to getting material things. You give just enough so that what you have is enough—and you have a very frugal sense of what’s required by enough—so that you can focus your discontent on what’s wrong with the mind. Those are the customs of the noble ones.

This is where they overlap with the second aspect of practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma.

In the Canon, they don’t talk so much about practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma as a matter of sticking to the original Dhamma, because the original Dhamma was what they knew. The Buddha had just set it out. It hadn’t been too much sullied by domesticated attitudes. So when the Buddha was talking about practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, the main thrust was elsewhere. It had to do with the purpose of practicing the Dhamma: for the sake of disenchantment, dispassion, release.

In other words, you aim high. This is the same principle as being discontent with skillful qualities—you aim high. You don’t let domestic attitudes limit your horizons. You don’t tell yourself, “I can’t go very far because I’m a layperson. I can’t go very far because I’m a young monk, or because I’m old, or because I’m too young,” or whatever.

As human beings, we all have a big potential. This is what the Buddha discovered by going outside of his culture. We can learn that by going outside of our culture. We begin to realize that we can realize that potential. The ariya dhammas, the noble dhammas, come down to four: virtue, concentration, discernment, release. The release is what makes the other three noble.

Just as being discontent with your skillful qualities until you get to the level where your skillful qualities get you to release, this is what makes all of these teachings noble—standing outside the culture of their time, standing outside the culture of our time.

It’s by following the noble path and aiming at the noble attainments that we become noble as well. This is a lesson we get from the life of Ajaan Mun, from the life of Ajaan Suwat, and all the great ajaans, going back to the time of the Buddha. They say that it is possible. Don’t sell yourself short.