The Mind Isn’t Wet

Ajaan Fuang told the story of one time he was out in the forest. Evening came, and he put up his umbrella tent. There’as a custom among the forest monks that when you put up an umbrella tent, you look around first to make sure there are no ant hills or anything that’s going to get in the way. Because once you put up the tent, you’re not going to move it. He looked around, and everything seemed fine. There was not a cloud in the sky.

You have to understand that umbrella tents are just an umbrella with a mosquito netting hanging down. It protects you from mosquitoes, but not from the wind and rain. Well, sure enough, that night—midnight—a big windstorm came up, with a lot of wind and rain. So he put all of his robes, except for his under robe, into his bowl to keep them dry. And he sat and meditated. He said the theme of his meditation was “The body may be wet, but the mind’s not wet.” He held on to that perception and was able to get into concentration. The next morning, when he came out, the storm was gone.

It’s an important lesson in learning how to separate the strength of your mind from the strength of your body. Usually they support each other, but there come times when the body just doesn’t have much strength at all, and you don’t want your mind’s strength to fall with it. Sometimes we get a little bit ill, and the mind is suddenly in a bad mood. Sometimes your digestion is bad, and you’re in a foul mood. If that’s the case, you can’t really trust your own mind.

So you have to find an independent source of strength inside. Have conviction that how you train your mind will make a big difference, so it’s really worth the effort that goes into the training. Then follow through. Learn to be enthusiastic about the training. Here you have a chance to make your mind independent. The world has lots of ups and downs, and there seem to be a lot of downs right now. But you can’t let your mind get down with it.

So be mindful. Get the mind into concentration so it has that independent source of food inside that will strengthen you—and the discernment that knows when to take on a burden and when not, what to lay claim to and what not to lay claim to. All too often we lay claim to things that weigh us down for no purpose at all. We have to learn that we can travel more lightly.

So these are ways you strengthen the mind. But the discernment, especially, allows you to divide the mind from its objects, so that the body is one thing, but your awareness of the body is something else, and the mind’s awareness of itself is something else again. That’s where the real strength lies. That kind of mind is not wet at all, because it doesn’t take on anything that could make it wet or anything that could get wet. Its strength is independent.