This sala has been here for 33 years. Originally, it was intended to last only five. When I joined the monastery in 1991, the sala had just come up. The people who were responsible for it had wanted to make the point that, no, they hadn’t asked permission from the county, and it was up to me to talk to the county to make the county accept the fact that we put up a temporary building like this.

They wanted to prove that the intention was temporary, so they put it on very weak foundations. It was just sitting on top of a couple concrete blocks. Well, the county was not impressed.

After some negotiation, we decided that we would put in more solid foundations, and leave the sala here until the time came to tear it down, the plan being that we would soon get a more permanent building. And here we are thirty-three years later. The decision has been made that it has to be demolished to make room for the new sala.

It makes you stop and think: Thirty-three years—if the walls could talk what would they say? The most important things they would say would be the talks that Ajaan Suwat gave, conversations, formal talks during the first five years, when he was here. The themes that he stressed over and over again were ones that he said that Ajaan Mun tended to stress in his Dhamma talks. One was practicing the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma, and the other was the customs of the noble ones.

We tend to think of the Forest Tradition as being quintessentially Thai, but Ajaan Mun was accused of not behaving in line with Thai customs: living in the forest, eating out of his bowl, being very strict about the Vinaya. But as he said, if you want to be a noble one, you have to practice by the customs of the noble ones, and not by the customs of any particular country, because every country’s customs are put together by people with defilements.

The customs of the noble ones give us an idea of what the values of the noble ones are. If you adopt their values, then you’re on the right track. The Canon lists four. The first three are contentment with food, clothing, and shelter. You’re content with what you get—you don’t struggle to get more. At the same time, you don’t exalt yourself or disparage others over the fact that you’re more content than they are.

That line makes you think about the article that appeared in The Onion about a contest among meditating monks to see who could be the most serene. The winner of the contest is shown raising his arms up in victory with a big happy smile on his face.

We’re not here to compete with others. We’re here to compete with our own defilements, our own greed, our own pride. So we learn to use the requisites of life, not to stoke our greed or stoke our pride, but to be content with what we have so that we can focus on the areas where we should not be content.

This has to do with the fourth of the customs of the noble ones, which is to delight in abandoning and to delight in developing. In other words, you delight in abandoning unskillful qualities, and you delight in developing skillful ones. Like right now, as you’re meditating: You want to delight in being with the breath. You want to delight in getting past your distractions.

This requires a change in attitude. One, when unskillful things come up, you’re not content. There’s that line of thought that says, “If you try to get rid of your unskillful mental qualities, that’s engaging in craving for non-becoming. It’s showing aversion.” Well, there are times when you have to be averse to things that are unskillful. If you let unskillful qualities stay, they’re going to take over.

And you’re missing out on the basic principles of right effort: If something unskillful has arisen, you try to get rid of it. Then you try to prevent it from arising again. As for skillful qualities, if they’re not there yet, you try to give rise to them, and then you try to maintain them and get them to develop even further. So if you find yourself wandering off, away from the breath, you try to bring yourself back. And as you stay here, you try to strengthen your focus.

This is one of the reasons why we work with getting the breath comfortable, trying to be aware of the whole body as you breathe in and breathe out. Notice where the breath is flowing well and where it’s not flowing well. And where it’s not flowing well, what can you do to open up the channels that allow it to flow? You don’t have to push it.

Ajaan Lee has a good image. He says it’s like cutting roads through the wilderness. Things get connected. And when you build a road, you don’t have to push the cars down the road. The cars will come, and if the road is there and it’s smooth, they’ll go on their own. In the same way, you open up the channels, think of things relaxing wherever there’s tension. Then the breath will flow; you don’t have to push it. Once it’s there, you try to maintain it.

So that’s the fourth custom of the noble one—delighting in abandoning, delighting in developing. It’s in line with the Buddha’s principle when he said that the secret to his awakening was, one, not giving up on his efforts and, two, not resting content with the skillful qualities he had.

This is one area where he actually advised discontent. If things aren’t good enough in the mind, what can you do to make them better? Because you do have that power.

Now, all of this assumes that other principle: practicing the Dhamma in line with the Dhamma. The Buddha talks about the fact that we’re training the mind in virtue, concentration, discernment, or what he calls heightened virtue, heightened mind, heightened discernment.

Even though to some extent the Buddha is our trainer, he’s not here right now. You have to internalize his instructions, internalize his values. Which means that part of your mind is the trainer, and part of the mind is being trained. As he says, you listen to the Dhamma, you contemplate it, you decide that it makes sense. That thought gives rise to a desire to practice. When you have that desire to practice, then there’s a willingness to take on the Buddha’s standards. And then you judge what’s going on in your mind against those standards.

We’re often told that we’re trying to develop a non-judging state of mind. The Buddha never said that. I mean, how are you going to know what’s skillful and what’s not skillful unless you pass judgment? The important point is that you have to have a healthy, mature, attitude both in the judging, and in receiving the judgments.

In making the judgment, remember: Your purpose is to judge a work in progress, and not to come to a final verdict on whether you’re a worthy meditator or not. You take it for granted that things can be improved. Then the question is, how do you do it? How do you recognize when something’s not up to standard? And how do you encourage yourself to bring it up to standard?

Remember that the Buddha’s purpose in establishing these standards—the duties of the four noble truths—was compassionate. The whole purpose of the four noble truths is to help you put an end to suffering. If you want to put an end to suffering, then he says this is what you’ve got to do: You’ve got to comprehend suffering, abandon the cause, develop the path, so that you can realize the cessation of suffering. Those are all compassionate duties.

And as I said, he’s not imposing them on you. He realized he was not in a position to impose anything on anybody. He wasn’t anybody’s father or creator, but he was experienced. As he saw, this was how causality works. If you want to work it to your advantage, this is what you’ve got to do.

So part of the mind accepts those standards. That’s the willingness to take them on, and it’s got to look at the other part.

The other part has to be willing to listen. You’ll have parts of the mind that say, “I’d rather find the pleasure right now rather than the pleasures of the practice. I want something easier, something more familiar.” You have to question them, “Why? Is life as you’ve lived it so far satisfactory? Is it good enough?”

This is where that principle of not resting content with what you’ve got, the good things you’ve got, comes in. You realize that third noble truth tells you there’s something better. There’s a state of mind where there is no suffering, and it can be attained through your efforts.

So the judgments are there with a compassionate motive. If you receive those judgments with that understanding, it’s a lot easier to accept them.

We read about some of the ajaans in Thailand who were quite strict with their students, and there have been some people who just dismiss them as being aversive. But that’s missing the point: They’d found that they had to be strict with themselves in order to get the most out of the practice. Their being strict with others was their way of showing compassion: “Think, don’t rest content—there’s more—there’s better. When you get to the point where you’ve reached what’s really better, then you can put down your tools.” This work in progress has finally progressed to the point where it’s done.

But until it’s done, remember that you’re on a path, and it’s easy to wander off the path. You wander off the path, and what happens? The Buddha’s image is of a cart that wanders away from a main road. It gets on a rough road, the axle breaks, the wheels get twisted, and you can’t go anywhere.

So you want to do your best to stay on the road. Practice the Dhamma in accordance with the Dhamma. That can mean two things. One is that you don’t try to change the Dhamma to suit your ideas. This gets back to that issue of the customs of the noble ones. You delight in developing, you delight in abandoning in line with the Buddha’s standards. We’re not here to follow American customs or Brazilian customs or whatever customs. What brings us together is practicing the customs of the noble ones. That’s one meaning.

The other meaning is that you practice for the sake of disenchantment and dispassion. Now, that may sound gray and dull, but the Buddha always equates dispassion with release, freedom. We keep fabricating our experience in the old ways that we’re familiar with, and even though we may not think that we’re passionate about it, we are stuck in our ways. That’s a kind of passion.

We need to realize that we can be freed from our old bad habits. A good analogy is a game that you used to play as a child. It fascinated you, it challenged you, but then you get to a point where you realize you’ve seen all that game has to offer. Like tic-tac-toe: You finally realize where to put the x’s and the zeros so that, at least, you never loose. Then there’s no more challenge. It doesn’t pull you. It doesn’t tie you down, doesn’t waste your time anymore. You’re freed from it.

That’s what the practice of the Dhamma is for—to free ourselves from our old habits. Which, of course, is going to mean stirring up a lot of your old habits. Questioning them. But that’s what the quality of willingness is all about, the judgment we’re passing is all about, so that we can arrive at the truth—to see what the Buddha said about suffering is really true. It is possible to experience the end of suffering in a way that’s never going to let you down.

So those are some of the teachings we would get from Ajaan Suwat. This building, even though it’s now destined for demolition, has seen a lot of good things. But the fact that it’s going to be demolished teaches us another lesson: that things don’t last forever. The opportunity to practice doesn’t last forever, so take advantage of the opportunity that you have right now.

Our hope is to replace this building with a new one. But who knows? War may come. Economic collapse may come. We may find that the situation for practice may be more difficult, so take advantage of the ease we have right now. But also learn that no matter how easeful or difficult it is, this is a practice that’s always worth doing.

This is why it’s been transplanted here in the West. It’s not just an Asian value or an Asian custom. As Ajaan Suwat said, we’re not here to force everybody to be Thai, we’re here to practice the customs of the noble ones, so that we can become noble as well.

Those are principles that are true when the practice is easy; they’re true when the practice is hard. They apply everywhere and always.