Our Real Home¹

What does the word dhamma refer to? Everything is a dhamma, there is nothing that is not a dhamma. And what about ''world''? The world is the very mental state that is agitating you at the present moment. ''What are they going to do? When I'm gone who will look after them? How will they manage?'' This is all just the ''world.'' Even the mere arising of a thought fearing death or pain is the world. Throw the world away! The world is the way it is. If you allow it to dominate your mind it becomes obscured and can't see itself. So whatever appears in the mind, just say, ''This isn't my business. It's impermanent, unsatisfactory and not self.''

Thinking you'd like to go on living for a long time will make you suffer. But thinking you'd like to die right away or very quickly isn't right either. It's suffering, isn't it? Conditions don't belong to us, they follow their own natural laws. You can't do anything about the way the body is. You can beautify it a little, make it attractive and clean for a while, like the young girls who paint their lips and let their nails grow long, but when old age arrives, everybody's in the same boat. That's the way the body is, you can't make it any other way. What you can improve and beautify is the mind.

Anyone can build a house of wood and bricks, but the Buddha taught that that sort of home is not our real home, it's only nominally ours. It's home in the world and it follows the ways of the world. Our real home is inner peace. An external, material home may well be pretty but it is not very peaceful. There's this worry and then that, this anxiety and then that. So we say it's not our real home, it's external to us. Sooner or later we'll have to give it up. It's not a place we can live in permanently because it doesn't truly belong to us, it belongs to the world. Our body is the same. We take it to be a self, to be ''me'' or ''mine,'' but in fact it's not really so at all, it's another worldly home. Your body has followed its natural course from birth, until now it's old and sick, and you can't forbid it from doing that. That's the way it is. Wanting it to be any different would be as foolish as wanting a duck to be like a chicken. When you see that that's impossible - that a duck must be a duck and a chicken must be a chicken, and that the bodies have to get old and die - you will find courage and energy. However much you want the body to go on lasting, it won't do that.

Footnotes

...¹

A talk addressed to an aging lay disciple approaching her death

... reality²

Saccadhamma.

...³

A chant traditionally recited at funeral ceremonies.