The Celibate Life

The Celibate Life

§ “Some people say that monks don’t do any work, but actually the work of abandoning your defilements is the most difficult work in the world. The work of the everyday world has its days off, but our work doesn’t have any time off at all. It’s something you have to do 24 hours a day. Sometimes you may feel you’re not up to it, but still you have to do it. If you don’t, who’s going to do it for you? It’s your duty, and nobody else’s. If you don’t do it, what are you living off the donations of other people for?”

§ “Whatever work you’re doing, keep an eye on your mind. If you see that it’s going off the path, stop whatever you’re doing and focus all your attention on it. The work of looking after your mind should always come first.”

§ “The Buddha’s Dhamma is akaliko — timeless. The reason we haven’t reached it yet is because we have lots of times: time for this, time for that, time to work, time to rest, time to eat, time to sleep… Our whole life turns into times, and as a result they don’t give us a chance to see the truth clearly within ourselves. So we have to make our practice timeless. That’s when the truth will appear in our hearts.”

§ Ajaan Fuang was very meticulous about keeping things clean and in their place, and taught his students to be meticulous too, for that was the way he was taught by his teachers, and he knew that he had benefitted from it. In his words, “If you can’t master obvious things like this, how are you going to master the subtle things, like the mind?”

§ The monk who attended to his needs — cleaning his hut, boiling the water for his bath, looking after him when he was sick, etc. — had to be very observant, for Ajaan Fuang used the teacher-student relationship as an opportunity to teach by example. Instead of explaining where things should be placed or when certain duties should be done, he left it up to the student to observe for himself. If he caught on, Ajaan Fuang wouldn’t say anything. If he didn’t, Ajaan Fuang would give him a dressing down — but still wouldn’t explain what was wrong. It was up to the student to figure things out for himself. As Ajaan Fuang said, “If it gets to the point where I have to tell you, it shows that we’re still strangers.”

§ One evening, one of the monks at Wat Dhammasathit saw Ajaan Fuang working alone, picking up scraps of lumber around the chedi construction site and putting them in order. The monk ran down to help him, and after a while asked him, “Than Phaw, this sort of work isn’t something you should be doing alone. There are lots of other people. Why don’t you get them to help?”

“I am getting other people to help,” Ajaan Fuang answered as he continued to pick up pieces of wood.

“Who?” the monk asked as he looked around and saw no one else.

“You.”

§ When I returned to Thailand in 1976 to be ordained, Ajaan Fuang gave me two warnings: 1) “Being a meditator isn’t simply a matter of sitting with your eyes closed. You have to be sharp at everything you do.”

2) “If you want to learn, you have to think like a thief and figure out how to steal your knowledge. What this means is that you can’t just wait for the teacher to explain everything. You have to notice for yourself what he does, and why — for everything he does has its reason.”

§ The relationship of a monk to his supporters is something of a balancing act. One of Ajaan Fuang’s favorite reminders to his monk disciples was, “Remember, nobody’s hired you to become a monk. You haven’t ordained to become anybody’s servant.” But if a monk complained that the monastery attendants weren’t doing as they were told, he’d say, “Did you ordain to have other people wait on you?”

§ “Our life depends on the support of others, so don’t do anything that would weigh them down.”

§ “Monks who eat the food that other people donate, but then don’t practice, can expect to be reborn as water buffaloes next time around, to till the fields and work off their debts.”

§ “Don’t think that the small disciplinary rules aren’t important. As Ajaan Mun once said, logs have never gotten into people’s eyes, but fine sawdust can — and it can blind you.”

§ Western women are often upset when they learn that monks aren’t allowed to touch them, and they usually take it as a sign that Buddhism discriminates against women. But as Ajaan Fuang explained it, “The reason the Buddha didn’t allow monks to touch women is not that there’s anything wrong with women. It’s because there’s something wrong with the monks: They still have mental defilements, which is why they have to be kept under control.”

§ For anyone who tries to follow the celibate life, the opposite sex is the biggest temptation to leave the path. If Ajaan Fuang was teaching monks, he’d say, “Women are like vines. At first they seem so weak and soft, but if you let them grow on you, they curl up around you until they have you all tied up and finally bring you down.”

When teaching nuns, he’d warn them about men. Once a nun was thinking of disrobing and returning home, knowing that her father would arrange a marriage for her. She asked Ajaan Fuang for advice, and he told her, “Ask yourself. Do you want to live inside the noose or out?” As a result, she decided she’d rather stay out.

§ “If you find yourself thinking about sex, run your hand over your head to remind yourself of who you are.”

§ Ajaan Fuang had many stories to tell about his times with Ajaan Lee. One of my favorites was of the time a large group of Ajaan Lee’s Bangkok students arranged to go with him on a meditation trip into the forest. They agreed to meet at Hua Lampong, the main train station in Bangkok, and take the train north to Lopburi. When the group assembled at the station, though, it turned out that many of them had each brought along at least two large suitcases of “necessities” for the trip, and even many of the monks from Bangkok monasteries had brought along large loads. On seeing this, Ajaan Lee said nothing, but simply set out walking north along the railroad tracks. Since he was walking, everyone had to walk, although it wasn’t long before the members of the group most burdened down began complaining, “Than Phaw, why are you making us walk? We’ve got so much heavy stuff to carry!”

At first Ajaan Lee said nothing, but finally told them, as he kept on walking, “If it’s heavy, then why burden yourself with it?” It took a few moments for his message to sink in, but soon the different members of the group had stopped to open their bags and throw everything unessential into the lotus ponds that lined either side of the railroad tracks. When they reached the next train station, Ajaan Lee saw that they had trimmed down their belongings enough that he could let them take the next train north.

§ “When you live in a monastery, pretend that you’re living alone: What this means is that once you’ve finished with the group activities — the meal, the chanting, the chores, and so on — you don’t have to get involved with anyone. Go back to your hut and meditate.

“When you live alone, pretend that you’re in a monastery: Set up a schedule and stick to it.”

§ When I went to Wat Asokaram — a very large monastery — for my first Rains Retreat, Ajaan Fuang told me, “If they ask you questions in Thai, answer in English. If they ask in English, answer in Thai. After a while they’ll get tired to talking to you, and will leave you alone to meditate.”

§ “It’s good to live in a monastery where not everyone is serious about the practice, because it teaches you to depend on yourself. If you lived only with people who were serious meditators, you’d get so that you wouldn’t be able to survive anywhere else.”

§ “We keep disagreeable people around the monastery as a way of testing to see if our defilements really are all gone.”

§ “The purpose of adhering to the ascetic practices is to wear down your defilements. If you adhere to them with the thought of impressing other people, you’d do better not to adhere to them at all.”

§ On fasting as an aid to meditation: “For some people it works well, for others it works just the opposite — the more they fast, the stronger their defilements get. It’s not the case that when you starve the body you starve the defilements, because defilements don’t come from the body. They come from the mind.”

§ “There’s a passage where the Buddha asks, ‘Days and nights pass by, pass by. What are you doing right now?’ So what answer do you have for him?”

§ “If you go teaching others before your own practice is up to standard, you do more harm than good.”

§ “Training a meditator is like training a boxer: You pull your punches and don’t hit him any harder than he can take. But when he comes back at you, he gives it everything he’s got.”

§ The first time I was going to give a sermon, Ajaan Fuang told me: “Pretend you have a sword in your hand. If any people in the audience think critical thoughts of you, cut off their heads.”

§ When I first went to Wat Dhammasathit, the trip from Bangkok was an all-day affair, since the roads were much worse and more roundabout than now. One evening a woman rented a cab and traveled all the way from Bangkok to get Ajaan Fuang’s advice on the problems she was having in her family, and after a couple of hours of consultation she took the cab all the way back.

After she left, he said to me, “There’s one good thing about living way out here: If we were living near Bangkok, people with a lot of free time on their hands and no idea of how to spend it would come and waste our time chatting all day. But here, when people make the effort to come out, it shows that they really want our help. And no matter how many hours it takes to talk things over with them, it’s no waste of time at all.”

§ “When people come to see me, I have them sit and meditate first so that they know how to make their minds quiet. Only then will I let them bring up any other problems they may want to talk about. If you try discussing things with them when their minds aren’t quiet, there’s no way they’ll understand.”

§ “If people get it into their heads that they’re enlightened when they aren’t, then you shouldn’t waste any breath on trying to straighten them out. If they don’t have faith in you 100%, then the more you try to reason with them, the more they’ll get set in their opinions. If they do have faith in you, then all it takes is one sentence or two and they’ll come to their senses.”

§ Once the father of one of the monks living with Ajaan Fuang wrote his son a letter asking him to disrobe, return home, continue his studies, get a job, start a family, and have a normal, happy life like everyone else in the world. The monk mentioned this to Ajaan Fuang, who said, “He says his kind of happiness is something special, but look at it — what kind of happiness is it, really? Just the same old smelly stuff you left when you ordained. Isn’t there any happiness better than that?”