Devorohana

Close your eyes and focus on your breath. Know when it’s coming in; know when it’s going out. Stay with the breath as much as you can, as consistently as you can. When you meditate, you’re trying to develop good qualities in the mind. In fact, that’s the meaning of the Pali term for meditation, bhavana: development. You’re trying to develop mindfulness, keeping something in mind; alertness, watching what you’re doing; and then ardency, trying to do this well. Give it your full attention. If the mind slips off, bring it right back. Slips off again, bring it back again. Try to make the breath as comfortable as possible so that it’s a pleasant place to come back to. Then keep at that.

Today in Thailand is the day called Taak Baat Thewo from the Pali, Devarohana, the day when the devas opened the world. The story goes that when the Buddha was born, after seven days his mother died and was reborn in heaven. After he gained awakening, he decided to teach her. So he went up into the heavens and spent a whole rains retreat teaching his mother, who had now become a male deva.

At the end of the rains, he came down, back to Earth. A stairway came from heaven down to Earth. The Buddha came down the stairway. Indra escorted him on one side; a Brahma on the other. People who hadn’t had the opportunity to make merit for three months with him were thronging around at the base of the stairway. You may have noticed the rice wrapped in banana leaves we had this morning. They say that a lot of people couldn’t get close to the Buddha, so they wrapped their rice in banana leaves and threw it into his bowl. It’s not a very pretty picture.

But what is interesting about the day, as I said, as the devas came down, they opened up the world so that everybody on every level of the world could see everybody else on every other level. Beings on Earth could see that there really were hells; and there really were heavens; there really were Brahma worlds. For that brief moment, the punishments in hell were lifted for a bit so that hell beings could see what was going on up in the world above them as well.

You can imagine, if you actually saw that, what an impact it would have on you. We hear about the heavens, we hear about the other worlds, but all we have are worlds in our imaginations, which sometimes have some influence on our behavior and sometimes don’t. It’s easy to forget. But if you actually saw these things, realizing that your actions do have consequences—they can have long-term consequences—you’d be very careful about what you did. It’s a shame this doesn’t happen once a year, actually opening up the world so people can see.

I noticed when I was in Thailand, as the ajaans got older, they got more and more insistent that this was the important teaching they wanted to leave behind with our students: Heavens are real; hells are real; all these various levels of being that the Buddha talked about are real. His teachings about how to get to the different levels were also real, so you could take your actions seriously.

The world tells you that what they’re doing is more important than what you’re doing, so you have to pay attention to them. But the Buddha says what you’re doing here is the most important thing in your life, so you pay attention here. Be very careful not to harm anybody. This is why we take the precepts every week, every week, to remind you that this is really an important, basic part of the practice. The precepts make you honest, and they make you more sensitive to what’s going on, both in your actions and also in your intentions behind the actions. That’s something you want to be sensitive to. Otherwise, if there’s any desire to harm anybody, even as a careless desire, it really does leave a mark in the mind. You don’t want to have your mind scarred up like that.

So think about that: If the heavens and the hells were open, if we could see them all the time, you’d do everything you could to avoid the hells, get to the heavens, where you could practice and get out of all this. After all, even the heavenly realms have their end, and the devas fall. The brahmas fall. When they fall, they fall hard. So do your best to practice. Take the Buddha’s teachings on karma and rebirth seriously. You’ll find that you benefit, and the people around you benefit as well.