One of my favourite very short stories is of a seeker of some kind, coming across a wise man (in some versions it is a wise woman), and engaging him in conversation. At the end of their conversation the sage reveals from within a carefully folded piece of cloth a most incredible jewel. The young man, the young traveller or seeker, is absolutely dazzled by the jewel, and says, ‘Can I have this jewe…

Prince Siddhartha had a wife; He loved her like he loved life. She was fine, and she was fair, And when he said goodbye, he said to her. Yashodhara, look at where life leads; Yashodhara, I’m going to try to get free. I took a little trip into town, I learned that death will cut us down, I woke up by the city wall, Freedom to die is no freedom at all. Yashodhara, look at where life leads; Yashodhar…

The following was from an email that was sent by Tan Kovilo to Luang Por Pasanno on October 14, 2017. Tan Kovilo started by describing the setting: > Today is Kathina day at Wat Nanachat and Luang Por Liam made a surprise visit just before the meal. It was a blessing to see and pay respects to him as always…but especially so today as the first thing he brought up after the community had bowed to h…

Love tends to get intertwined with other emotions, making those who have never considered it closely mistake the emotions associated with love for a part of, or indeed expressions of, love itself. Usually, for example, rather than considering worries and jealousy to be impurities of love, we take them to be a proof of it, and thus gladly harbour such feelings. We tend to blind ourselves to love’s…

When we meditate, we let go of our present preoccupations. Normally the mind is always preoccupied with the various objects that the eye sees, the ear hears, the nose smells, the tongue tastes, and the body comes into contact with. But when we want peace of mind, we have to see these objects as coarse and gross. We try to let go of things that are gross, things that are sensual. We focus instead o…

§ “Sensual pleasure is like a drug: One taste and you get addicted. They say that with heroin it’s hard to break the habit, but this is even worse. It goes deep, right into the bone. It’s what made us get born in the first place, and has kept us circling through birth and death for aeons and aeons. There’s no medicine you can take to break the habit, to wash it out of your system, aside from the m…

We have all come together here to keep precepts, to develop meditation and to cultivate wisdom in our hearts. This intention is something very hard to find in the minds of people in this present day. When we have mindfulness and wisdom, we can see the harm there is in acting in unskillful ways and doing things which transgress the precepts. In keeping the five precepts, always maintaining them in…

A theme we explored on the Thanksgiving Retreat was “complaining and blaming.” I thought it would be a useful theme because our culture tends toward complaint. If I’m suffering, then the way to the end of suffering is to complain or blame. I’m suffering, therefore it’s somebody else’s fault. I’ve been treated unfairly. This isn’t right. It shouldn’t be this way. This is powerful conditioning in ou…

169. People outside may call us mad to live in the forest like this, sitting like statues. But how do they live? They laugh, they cry, they are so caught up that at times they kill themselves or one another out of greed and hatred. Who are the mad ones? 167. Some people are afraid of generosity. They feel that they will be exploited or oppressed. In cultivating generosity, we are only oppressing o…

Ajahn Dtoen came to visit us once, right after one of our winter retreats. During a question and answer period, I asked him if there were any exercises we could do to improve the wholesomeness of our speech or how to approach right speech as a practice. He saw right through me. He could see I was hoping there was some sort of technique I could apply before speaking that would solve all my problems…