For the past several decades, a growing flood of books, articles, and teachings has advanced two theories about the practice of mindfulness (sati). The first is that the Buddha employed the term mindfulness to mean bare attention: a state of pure receptivity—non-reactive, non-judging, non-interfering—toward physical and mental phenomena as they make contact at the six senses. The second theory is…

Over the centuries the Southern and Northern lineages have developed critiques of each other’s way of practice which have been passed on and adopted as received knowledge. When we can only base our own ideas on information from books or the established outlook portrayed by particular lineages, these critiques seem to be reasonable. Some of the most common Southern points of view argue that the Mah…

‘Don’t be an arahant; don’t be a bodhisattva; don’t be anything at all – if you are anything at all you will suffer’ [Ajahn Chah]. A student of Buddhism asked, ‘Which do you think is the best path: that of the arahant or that of the bodhisattva?’ Ajahn Sumedho replied, ‘That kind of question is asked by people who understand absolutely nothing about Buddhism!’ One of the larger and more significan…

The whole teaching of the Buddha is about finding a happiness that is different from conventional happiness. Conventional happiness keeps on breeding misery and unsatisfactory experiences. We tend to be experts in this kind of conditioned happiness: not a stable, fundamental happiness but a very conditioned one, dependent on many things. Some of those things are healthy and helpful; other things a…

We often believe that our emotions are a given, that they’re purely visceral, that they come prior to our thoughts; but that’s not necessarily so. A lot of unspoken or poorly articulated attitudes have gotten buried in our minds — a lot of unskillful habits of dealing with pain, say, that come from way back when. Those are the things that fuel our emotions around pain. They also fuel our emotions…

The monastic training that we receive in caring for our elders is another example of how we can train the mind in these small but ultimately transformative ways. One of the things I used to reflect on when I was looking after my mother was the way in which Ajahn Chah was cared for after he had his stroke. Ajahn Chah was paralyzed for the last ten years of his life, but he was beautifully ministere…

As for the fundamental nature of our need for help: life is difficult, and we realize sooner or later that we’re all vulnerable, subject to illness, subject to pain, and that we need other people’s involvement to keep going. We wouldn’t have got born or lived past the age of five without an enormous amount of help, and we wouldn’t have survived psychologically without about twenty years of encoura…

After being hurt in a relationship, some decide never to leave themselves open to such suffering again. They choose a strategy of closing their hearts as a defence, making themselves unavailable for trusting relationships of any kind. It is understandable that we try to protect ourselves from suffering, but in this case the strategy leads to another kind of suffering – that of isolation, lonelines…

The Buddhist teaching asks us to reflect on the human experience, starting with the feeling of separation and alienation that is common to all of us. If we don’t contemplate our own existence or try to understand it, then our life seems to be filled with meaningless activity and our sense of that tends to increase the feeling of separation and alienation. We want to find someone who will fulfill u…

As monastics, we make a commitment to harmlessness. However, the way our training works is to allow us to see directly those energies that maybe aren’t so harmless and aren’t so beautiful: the powerful lust, sensuality or rage that all come bubbling up. It can be rather alarming at first; but now, having experienced those energies within my own heart, I can understand much better the state of the…