Loyalty to Your Meditation

When you apply this story to the Dhamma, it becomes a lesson worth remembering. If you’re not loyal to your meditation object or to yourself, if you forget the breath you’re meditating on with buddho, buddho, and let your mind go wandering off in thoughts and concepts, it’s as if you’ve abandoned the monk you’re supposed to look after. You don’t follow him; you don’t act the role of his student as you had intended to. The results that you had hoped for will thus get ruined. In other words, your mind won’t get established in concentration. All kinds of hardships — the five Hindrances — will come flowing into the heart, and no peace will appear. This causes you to suffer and to miss out on the good results that you should have achieved.

At the same time, you cause hardships to others — i.e., the monk sitting up here giving you a Dhamma talk. He wastes his time, talking for hours until his rear end hurts. Instead of lying around his hut at his leisure, he has to sit here jabbering away with no results to show for it at all.

So keep this story in mind as a lesson in teaching yourself to be intent in doing what’s good. Don’t be the sort of person who — like the servant in the story — is disloyal to his monk.

This reflection from Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo is from The Heightened Mind, pp. 62-63.