Preface

In April of this year, members of Le Refuge, a Buddhist group located near Marseilles, invited me to lead a ten-day retreat on the topic of the skillful use of desire on the path of Buddhist practice. This is a topic around which there is a great deal of confusion, so I thought it would be a useful theme for the retreat. Because the Buddha identified three types of craving as the origin of suffering and stress, many people have jumped to the conclusion that he condemned all forms of desire. However, he actually taught that skillful desires—aimed at abandoning the causes of suffering and developing mental qualities conducive to the end of suffering—play a crucial role in the path to the ultimate happiness of nibbāna, or unbinding. In fact, the desire to put an end to suffering plays such a dominant role in guiding the path that all the Buddha’s other teachings, including his teachings about the self and the world, are designed to serve that desire and to achieve its aim: a happiness so great that it puts an end to the need for desires of any kind.

For this retreat, I focused on the teachings in which the Buddha most clearly advocates adopting values that are in line with the desire for the end of suffering—such as the four determinations and six topics of delight—and the teachings in which he recommends the techniques and strategies for achieving that desire’s aim, such as the noble eightfold path and the four bases for success.

The talks of the retreat were presented in two series: a series of evening talks on the role of skillful desire, and a series of morning talks on practical issues arising in meditation, and particularly in the practice of concentration. Every afternoon, there was a period for questions and answers concerning issues arising from the talks and from the retreatants’ meditation experiences.

The present book is based on both series of talks along with some of the questions and answers taken from the Q&A periods, presented chronologically. The talks, questions, and answers have been edited and expanded so as to make their coverage of the main topics of the retreat more complete than I was able to manage on the spot.

The talks draw on suttas, or discourses, from the Pāli Canon and on the writings and talks of the ajaans, or teachers, of the Thai forest tradition, in which I was trained. For people unfamiliar with the Canon, I have added passages from the discourses at the back of the book to flesh out some of the points made in the talks. These are followed by a glossary of Pāli terms.

For people unfamiliar with the Thai forest tradition, you should know that it is a meditation tradition founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by Ajaan Sao Kantasīlo and Ajaan Mun Bhūridatto. The ajaans mentioned in the talks all trained under Ajaan Mun. Of these, Ajaan Fuang Jotiko and Ajaan Suwat Suvaco were my teachers. Ajaan Fuang, although he spent some time training directly under Ajaan Mun, spent more time training under one of Ajaan Mun’s students, Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo.

Many people have helped with the preparation of this book. In particular, I would like to thank the people of Le Refuge who made the retreat possible; my interpreter, Khamaṇo Bhikkhu (Than Lionel); as well as Jean-Paul and Tadum Bernier and Philippe and Watthani Cortey-Dumont, who hosted my in stay in France. Here in America, Addie Onsanit prepared the transcript of the talks, and the monks at the monastery helped put it in its final form. Any mistakes in the book, of course, are my own responsibility.

Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu

(Geoffrey DeGraff)