What does a Buddhist monk know about the real world anyway?” It’s a common question because there’s a sense of the monastery being an isolated sanctuary where we say, “Goodbye cruel world,” then we come into our beautiful sacred space and suddenly we’re spiritual. That’s a bit of a sweeping generalization, but it’s often the way people think. What is a monastery, anyway? What is the purpose of a s…

This last week has been a full one, with lots of contact and engagement. That’s the nature of monastic life, even though there’s a bottom line of simplicity. One goes through various phases of solitude and engagement. It’s important to make a conscious effort to bring things back to a life of more solitude and less engagement. It’s interesting to see how the mind picks up a particular way of relat…

This reflection is excerpted and adapted from “Running Away from Phantoms,” a Dhamma Talk offered by Ajahn Sucitto at Abhayagiri in 2007 — “What if I get it wrong?” “What if it doesn’t work?” “What if I’m left here alone?” Just look over the edge of that. Look over the edge of ‘what if’ and let your mind open up and realize that we’ve been running away from phantoms. Examine the attitudes you have…

(These teachings by Tan Ajahn Dtun were part of a meditation retreat for laypeople held in Australia in March 2005.) 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 unsk…

Within the teachings of the Lord Buddha, the Buddha instructed the community of his disciples (monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen) to become acquainted with the truths of nature; that is, with regards to one’s own body, the bodies of others and all material objects - all come into being and exist for a period of time before finally ceasing to be. The Buddha was teaching that we should know the natur…

The role of our weekly Observance Day is to put things down and focus on the precepts and the formal spiritual qualities of our life. It’s a day of recollecting, a day of observing; it’s a day to remember Dhamma, to observe that primal principle and our primal motivation for being here at the monastery. It’s a time to recollect the possibility we have as human beings to let go of all confusion, de…

In the next few days there will be some coming and going. One of the laypeople who has been here a while will be moving back to Thailand in a few days. There’s a word in Pali that’s an epitaph of the Buddha: sugata. It means coming well or going well. What is a sugata? What is someone who goes well and comes well? When a person makes kamma (performs actions), and this action has been purified in t…

When bringing our Dhamma practice into daily life it is important to learn how to pay attention to detail, to pay attention to small things. One can have a woolly, universal, “just be mindful” attitude and not be clear about what one is doing. It’s important to look after one’s duties and not overlook things and to keep things neat, tidy, clean and orderly. Attention to detail cultivates an attitu…

There are three ways we act on the inclinations, impulses, and intentions that come through the mind. We act on them through body, speech, or mind. Particularly in a monastery, we notice speech because there are many restraints on the activities we engage in. Things are often expressed in the form of speech, so it’s good to focus our attention on the habit of speech. We can learn a lot about ourse…

I’ve been thinking about these patterns of weather and patterns of nature the last little while. At the community work day a few days ago, people dragged dead branches and leaves out of the forest. Everything there on the ground was alive and growing with sap running through at one time. The leaves were green; they were living and functioning. Now they are on the ground dead and they’ve changed. I…