Remembering Ajaan Lee

Today is the 64th anniversary of Ajaan Lee’s passing. Because he was the teacher who taught the method that we’re practicing on this retreat, I’d like to talk a little bit about him this morning.

There’s a monastery in Thailand where they have a museum devoted to the forest ajaans, with statues of the most highly-regarded ajaans arranged around a room. At the base of each statue is a short statement about what was distinctive about that particular ajaan. Now, it’s pretty horrible to have your whole life reduced to one phrase. But in Ajaan Lee’s case, the phrase is: “one with high mental power.”

For most people, when they think about high mental power, they think about the high power of his concentration. And in this case, that is true. His concentration was very strong. He tells about times when he would spread mettā, and it sounds like he’s going into battle. There was one time when he was alone in a forest when there was an elephant in rut. They call it “in rut” because when male elephants get sexually excited, a liquid called “rut” comes out of a gland near their ears. They’re pretty crazed when that happens. The neighbors pleaded with Ajaan Lee to leave the forest because it was dangerous, but he told them that he had confidence in his own powers of mind.

Then one day, the elephant actually came to the clearing where he was staying. He looked the elephant in the eye and said to himself, “This elephant is crazed.” So before he knew it, he found himself trying to climb a tree. But then a voice came into his ear and said, “If you’re afraid of dying, you’re going to die many more times.” So he sat down at the base of the tree, facing the elephant, and spread lots of goodwill. The elephant stopped still for a moment, flapped its ears once or twice, and then walked away.

There was another time when Ajaan Lee took a group of lay people on a tudong into a forest next to the ocean. In the middle of the afternoon, they saw an enormous cloud of ocean mosquitoes coming toward shore. So he told everyone to get out of their mosquito nets. As he told them, “I’m going to fight off the mosquitoes with mettā. No holds barred.” And sure enough, after five minutes, the mosquitoes all went away.

This attitude, by the way, is very typical in the forest tradition: that goodwill is a form of strength. Here in the West, we tend to think of goodwill as a soft, tender emotion. But for the forest ajaans, they’ve seen many, many times that it has protected them from dangers, so for them, it’s definitely a strong force.

So the power of his concentration is one aspect of Ajaan Lee’s power of mind.

But there’s another side to that power, which was his intense curiosity. This relates to the breath meditation method that he taught. Among the forest ajaans, he was the one who devoted the most time and energy to developing this particular topic of meditation. It started one time in the 1930s, when he went to India to visit the Buddhist holy spots: where the Buddha was born, where he gained awakening, where he first taught the Dhamma, and where he passed away. At that time, very few people were taking that kind of pilgrimage.

When he went there, he saw all these yogis standing on one leg, lying on beds of nails, and so forth, and he wanted to know how they did that. Now, his way of answering that question was to pose the question in his mind and go into concentration. What came out of his concentration was that they were playing with the breath energies in their body. So he started doing the same sort of thing: not lying on beds of nails, but playing with the breath energies in his body. And he found that it was a very effective way of getting into concentration.

So when he came back to Thailand, he wrote down a technique for breath meditation, which is now Method One in the book, Keeping the Breath in Mind. At that point, they didn’t call it Method One, because there wasn’t yet a Method Two.

But he continued doing investigations, using his own breath, using his own concentration, until 1953, when he decided to go into the jungle in northern Thailand for the rains retreat. It took him three days to walk into the place where he planned to stay, and a few days after he arrived, he had a heart attack. No medicine. No doctors. No way to get out except to walk.

So he told himself, “If I have to die, I’m ready to die. But if I don’t have to die, let’s see if I can get out of here.” He had nothing else but his breath. So he started using his breath energies to help treat his heart, and by the end of the three months of the retreat, he was able to walk out. When he got out, he wrote down Method Two, which puts much more emphasis on the body than Method One.

You’ll notice, when you look at his Method Two, that when he starts the survey of the body, he starts at the back of the neck. And if you’ve ever had any heart problems, you’ll know the back of the neck is an area where a lot of tension tends to build up. So that’s probably why he started there.

If you look at his later Dhamma talks, you can see that he continued to experiment with the breath in different ways, and he would give many different analyses of what different types of breath there were in the body and how they can move around the body.

For instance, in Method Two, he talks about having the breath energy going down the spine. But in some of his Dhamma talks, he talks about the breath energy starting in the soles of the feet, going up the legs, and going up the spine. So the message is that there are many different ways that the breath energy can be used to help with the ailments in the body and getting the mind into full-body concentration.

Based on these experiments, he was one of the few forest ajaans who would talk about concentration as a whole-body awareness and give so much detail about how the breath energies can be used. When he started writing books about the practice, he focused on breath meditation more than anything else because, as he said, of all the breath meditation methods, this is the safest. As long as you’re grounded fully in the body, it’s the safest concentration you can have.

Among the forest ajaans, he was also one who wrote the most systematic treatments of how to practice the Dhamma. And he addressed the big issues of meditation, controversies like the relationship between mindfulness and concentration practice. There is one school of thought that mindfulness practice is one thing, concentration practice is something else, entirely different. But as Ajaan Lee pointed out, mindfulness is meant to get the mind into right concentration, so these two practices are intimately connected.

In his discussions of mindfulness, he emphasized the three qualities of mind you’re supposed to bring to it:

Of those three qualities, he identified ardency as the wisdom factor. In other words, wisdom isn’t just a matter of trying to see, “Oh yes, this is inconstant, this is stressful, this is not-self.” As Ajaan Lee basically says, if you’re ardent, you see that there are certain things that you have to develop and that you’re capable of doing, so you try to develop them as far as you can. Instead of just seeing things as they are, you’re seeing things as they can be—in other words, exploring what their potentials are.

In this sense, you’re actually fighting against the three characteristics—or, rather, the three perceptions—of inconstancy, stress, and not-self. You’re trying to create a state of mind that’s constant, pleasant, and under your control. Now, as you push against these three characteristics, you’ll eventually reach a point where they push back. That’s when you really get to know and understand them.

That’s where concentration practice comes in, and in this area, Ajaan Lee basically revived the discussion of jhāna. He’s the only one of the forest ajaans who describes the various stages of jhāna and how you get into them in great detail.

For example, with the first jhāna, you have five factors. He identified three of them as the causes. You have:

Then the other two factors of the first jhāna, pleasure and rapture, are the results.

Here again, Ajaan Lee identified the wisdom factor among these five, which is the evaluation. As you’re adjusting the breath and adjusting the mind, you’re getting a sense of cause and effect. You can see the extent to which you’re creating the causes for a sense of pleasure, a sense of rapture. That means you see the process of fabrication and the principles of cause and effect in action. That’s how evaluation gives rise to wisdom and discernment.

So these are some of the distinctive features of Ajaan Lee’s teachings and of the power of his mind.

I always think it’s amazing: Here he was, the son of peasants with just a fourth-grade education—reading, writing, arithmetic—but he was still able to solve a lot of the problems in the discussion of Buddhist meditation through his own curiosity, his willingness to experiment.

Also, of the various ajaans, he’s the one who talks the most about meditation as a skill, like the skills of sewing a pair of pants, weaving a basket, or making clay tiles. In other words, you work with an object. That’s ardency. You observe yourself as you’re doing the work. That’s alertness. Then you look at the results. And if the results are not good, you go back and try something else. That’s evaluation.

This is in line with the Buddha’s teachings on how the Dhamma is nourished, which is through commitment and reflection. You give something a serious try. You review the results. And then if what you’re doing isn’t working, then you try something else. This also involves a certain amount of ingenuity. You come up with new ideas and then test them.

Now, all of these qualities of Ajaan Lee were important in one other aspect of his life, which was that he brought the practice of the forest tradition into central Thailand. You have to realize what a major accomplishment this was: getting it out of the forests in the Northeast and bringing it down into Bangkok. The people in central Thailand tend to look down on the people from the Northeast. There was also the problem that, at that time, the government had asked the monks to stop their meditation practice and help set up an educational system instead, because Thailand was trying to fight off the British and the French who were trying to take over the country. The government’s policy was, “We need a national education system.” And who would be best to teach the kids? At that point they didn’t have any teacher-training schools, so they wanted the monks to become the teachers.

Some people complained that this was diverting the monks from their real duty, which was to practice for the sake of nibbāna, so the government conducted a survey. Whether the results of the survey were true or not, they claimed to have surveyed the different monasteries in Thailand where people were meditating, and they came to the conclusion that nobody was practicing correctly, so the monks might as well become elementary school teachers. That was the attitude in central Thailand at that time.

But in the Northeast, you had monks who were still wandering around in the forest, so the ecclesiastical authorities in Bangkok considered them to be vagabonds. There was a fear that they might be communists. So the monks in the forest tradition realized they needed some protection in Bangkok. It turned out that one old high-ranking monk in particular, a Somdet living in Bangkok, was in charge of overseeing the Northeast. He tended to harass the forest monks. But one time, he fell sick. So Ajaan Lee went to visit him. After bowing down, he sat over in a corner of the room and meditated quietly.

The Somdet could feel an intense force coming into his body from Ajaan Lee’s direction. He asked, “What are you doing?” Ajaan Lee replied, “I’m giving a gift of stillness.” The old monk said, “Well, whatever it is, keep doing it. It feels good.” So Ajaan Lee did this every day, every day. As the old monk started getting better, Ajaan Lee started teaching him how to meditate, and the old monk began to get results. He said, “I’ve been wasting my time as a monk.” He added, “It’s a shame that I’m the only one benefiting here.” On top of that, Ajaan Lee could explain the Dhamma in ways that he had never heard before. So he arranged for Ajaan Lee to begin giving Dhamma talks and leading meditation in one of the halls there at the monastery in Bangkok. This is how the teaching of the forest tradition began to come into Bangkok.

Here we get to the other side of Ajaan Lee’s strength of mind. Some of the other monks in the monastery were jealous of Ajaan Lee. They said he was teaching people to be deluded. Those monks believed that the time for jhāna had passed. So how did Ajaan Lee fight back? He had a number of psychic powers. He even had the ability to loan his psychic powers to other people. There was one old woman whose job was to wash the bathrooms in the monastery. When she had some free time, she would come and sit and meditate with Ajaan Lee. And she got so that she could read minds. So whose minds did she read first? The monks. And she was shocked. They were thinking things monks should not be thinking. She went and she told the Somdet. “Do you know what these monks are thinking?” She went down, person by person by person by person, what they were thinking. The Somdet said to himself, “She’s probably right.”

So he called all the monks together and told them, “You have to watch out. These people can read you inside and out”—literally: “down into your innards.” So people began to have a little bit of fear of Ajaan Lee. That also helped spread the forest tradition in central Thailand.

As Ajaan Lee said, “If the Buddha had tried to teach only through the force of words, Buddhism wouldn’t have lasted this long.” It also depended on the power of his mind.

There are lots of stories about Ajaan Lee’s psychic powers. I could keep you here all morning telling them, but I’ll tell one more story.

After Ajaan Lee had started teaching in Bangkok, someone gave him some land outside of Bangkok to start a monastery. It was a couple of miles outside of a town called Samut Prakaan. There was a bus that ran from the town past the monastery. So one time, Ajaan Lee with a couple of other monks got on the bus in Samut Prakaan and he asked the driver, “Can we stop off at this one store on the way? I’ll be just a couple of minutes. Can you wait for me and then take me to the monastery?”

The driver said, “Sorry, we don’t give any special treatment to anybody.”

So they get to the store. As soon as Ajaan Lee gets off the bus, the motor stops. He goes in and talks to the owner of the store. The driver cannot start the bus. The owner of the store invites Ajaan Lee to have a cup of tea. So Ajaan Lee has a cup of tea. The bus still doesn’t start. Then when he gets back on the bus, he says, “Okay, you can start the bus now.” And the bus starts up. From that point on, anything Ajaan Lee asked for, the bus drivers would give him.

So let’s dedicate this sit to the memory of Ajaan Lee.