The Dhamma Goes Westward

I said to him, ''Your thinking is the thinking of an earthworm. An earthworm lives in the ground. It eats earth for its food. Eating and eating, it starts to worry that it will run out of dirt to eat. It is surrounded by dirt, the whole earth is covering its head, but it worries it will run out of dirt.''

That's the thinking of an earthworm. People worry that the world won't progress, that it will come to an end. That's an earthworm's view. They aren't earthworms, but they think like them. That's the wrong understanding of the animal realm. They are really ignorant.

There's a story I've often told, about a tortoise and a snake. The forest was on fire and they were trying to flee. The tortoise was lumbering along, and then it saw the snake slither by. It felt pity for that snake. Why? The snake had no legs, so the tortoise figured it wouldn't be able to escape the fire. It wanted to help the snake. But as the fire kept spreading the snake fled easily, while the tortoise couldn't make it, even with its four legs, and it died there.

That was the tortoise's ignorance. It thought, if you have legs you can move. If you don't have legs, you can't go anywhere. So it was worried about the snake. It thought the snake would die because it didn't have legs. But the snake wasn't worried; it knew it could easily escape the danger.

This is one way to talk to people with their confused ideas. They will feel pity for you if you aren't like them and don't have their views and their knowledge. So who is ignorant? I'm ignorant in my own way; there are things I don't know about, so I'm ignorant on that account.

Meeting different situations can be a cause for tranquility. But I didn't understand how foolish and mistaken I was. Whenever something disturbed my mind, I tried to get away from it, to escape. What I was doing was escaping from peace. I was continually running away from peace. I didn't want to see this or know about that; I didn't want to think about or experience various things. I didn't realize that this was defilement. I only thought that I needed to remove myself and get far away from people and situations, so that I wouldn't meet anything disturbing or hear speech that was displeasing. The farther away I could get, the better.

After many years had passed, I was forced by the natural progression of events to change my ways. Having been ordained for some time, I ended up with more and more disciples, more people seeking me out. Living and practicing in the forest was something that attracted people to come and pay respects. So as the number of followers increased, I was forced to start facing things. I couldn't run away anymore. My ears had to hear sounds, my eyes to see. And it was then, as an Ajahn, that I started gaining more knowledge. It led to a lot of wisdom and a lot of letting go. There was a lot of everything going on and I learned not to grasp and hold on, but to keep letting go. It made me a lot more skillful than before.

When some suffering came about, it was OK; I didn't add on to it by trying to escape it. Previously, in my meditation, I had only desired tranquility. I thought that the external environment was only useful insofar as it could be a cause to help me attain tranquility. I didn't think that having right view would be the cause for realizing tranquility.

I've often said that there are two kinds of tranquility. The wise have divided it into peace through wisdom and peace through samatha. In peace through samatha, the eye has to be far from sights, the ear far from sounds, the nose far from smells and so on. Then not hearing, not knowing and so forth, one can become tranquil. This kind of peacefulness is good in its way. Is it of value? Yes, it is, but it is not supreme. It is short-lived. It doesn't have a reliable foundation. When the senses meet objects that are displeasing, it changes, because it doesn't want those things to be present. So the mind always has to struggle with these objects and no wisdom is born, since the person always feels that he is not at peace because of those external factors.

On the other hand, if you determine not to run away but to look directly at things, you come to realize that lack of tranquility is not due to external objects or situations, but only happens because of wrong understanding. I often teach my disciples about this. I tell them, when you are intently devoted to finding tranquility in your meditation, you can seek out the quietest, most remote place, where you won't meet with sights or sounds, where there is nothing going on that will disturb you. There the mind can settle down and become calm because there is nothing to provoke it. Then, when you experience this, examine it to see how much strength it has: when you come out of that place and start experiencing sense contact, notice how you become pleased and displeased, gladdened and dejected, and how the mind becomes disturbed. Then you will understand that this kind of tranquility is not genuine.

Whatever occurs in your field of experience is merely what it is. When something pleases us, we decide that it is good and when something displeases us, we say it isn't good. That is only our own discriminating minds giving meaning to external objects. Understanding this, then we have a basis for investigating these things and seeing them as they really are. When there is tranquility in meditation, it's not necessary to do a lot of thinking. This sensitivity has a certain knowing quality that is born of the tranquil mind. This isn't thinking; it is dhammavicaya, the factor of investigating Dhamma.