-18- Characteristics and Benefits of a Forest Monastery
A forest monastery has to have characteristics like these here; then people can benefit from the arrangement. As a matter of fact, the terms ‘village monastery’ and ‘forest monastery’ have just appeared recently. In the old days, there were only forest monasteries, and all of them were beyond a village or town boundary.
New Translation: Loving Others
Good people, all those interested in the Dhamma, today’s lecture delivered during the Visākha Pūjā season is the fifth of the series devoted to those ‘important things that we tend to overlook.’ Today’s important thing that we tend to overlook takes the heading of ‘Loving Others,’ something we, all of us, are guilty of not doing.
The Living Computer
“I somewhat understand anattā and therefore the impossibility of a self, soul, being reincarnated, but I feel it doesn’t have to be a self that goes to a new life. It can be a momentum towards self, established in ignorance. This tendency towards the self concept may continue in universal mind and therefore create a new physical body. Do you think this could be so?”
Separation from All That We Love
When someone important in our life passes away, our grief can be of many layers. If our relationship to that person was a central part of our life, then we may suffer from the realization that the person we were in that relationship – spouse, son, daughter, friend – has gone and will never return. We may thus, in a way, be grieving for a cherished part of ourself.
The Highest Happiness
The development and prosperity of the mind is far reaching and continues to evolve until a person attains nibbana - when this liberation is attained it constitutes the highest, most infinite happiness.
Q26. What is Nibbāna?
If someone persistently raises this question, answer that Nibbāna is the immortal-element (amata-dhātu). Say it is the element that doesn’t perish.
-17- The Best Buddha-time Styled Uposatha
You have to see this on the top of Golden Buddha Hill before you can understand what it is. I say again that this is ultimately in compliance with the Buddha’s wish, and it is constructed in the best possible way to follow the style of what was built in the Buddha’s time. It is inexpensive, never harming the national economy.
Letters from Bangkok
Excerpts of letters written by Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu to his younger brother, Mr. Dhammadāsa Banij, in 1931, shortly before moving back to his southern home province of Chaiya and founding Suan Mokkh.
The Living Computer
“The Buddha’s first words on enlightenment were “Aneka jāti saṃsāraṃ sandhāvissaṃ anibhissaṃ” (Through the round of many births I roamed…). We chant these words every day. How then can one deny some kind of rebirth, whatever intellectual difficulties we face with the concept of anattā?”
New eBook: The First Ten Years of Suan Mokkh
As was mentioned in its Thai edition of 1989, this inspiring work of Ajahn Buddhadāsa’s describes the formative years of his forest monastery, Suan Mokkh, in Chaiya, Surat Thani, Thailand, and the movement under his leadership; it is both linguistically and descriptively well-written in Thai and is accepted as an excellent Thai essay of the present time.
The Well-Trained Mind
How many times have we suffered, and how many times have we created suffering for others, because of our negative emotions? How many times have we been consumed by self-aversion because of things we have said or done? How many times have we acted in ways that we had previously promised ourselves, ‘Never again!’
The Mind’s Power is Paramount
People who know both realms of this world are certain that "the body resides in the mind." They know that when compared to the mind, the body is insignificant and must still depend on the mind. The mind's power is always foremost, constant, and of the highest quality.
Q25. What is the fullest emptiness?
Total emptiness or freedom is called Nibbāna. The reality completely and thoroughly empty of self-essence is Nibbāna.
-16- The Dry Remains of a Brook
The remains of a brook are on Suan Mokkh’s boundary line beyond the women’s residential area. They start on top of a hill and then disappear below. During the dry season, it’s bone dry. Its remains show that it once had a lot of water because the brook bed was cut into a deep channel. But deforestation has made it dry – not a drop of water remains.
Enmity
The Buddha once said, ‘Enmity never comes to cease through enmity. Enmity only ever comes to cease through non-enmity. This is a timeless truth.’
Over 2,500 years after these words were uttered we might add that it is indeed a timeless truth, but also one that is endlessly forgotten.
Dhamma Happiness
Those who know this world well pay homage to the happiness of the Dhamma, to the importance of true spiritual happiness.
Q24. Why is mind in experiencing the world’s emptiness described as empty-mind (cit-waang)?
A verse in one of the later text says, ‘That is truly empty which is empty of lust, hatred, and delusion.’* A mind is empty (unencumbered, disengaged, or free) when it is free of lust, hatred, and delusion.
-15- Dhamma Study and Meditation Training for Foreigners
There are two kinds of training offered here, one for general Dhamma principles and the other for meditation. They are two different things, but deserve being studied just the same. This is because, if you don’t know Dhamma principles, you will not know what direction you should travel along.
