Dwellings
March 26, 2024

People here at the monastery, our local supporters, even people far away, are getting sentimental and nostalgic about the sala now that the word has gotten out that it’s going to be torn down. And it is true that a lot of good has been done here.

One of the more memorable events was when we had a visitor, a very troubled person, who stayed with us for a couple of months. He’d been contemplating suicide ever since he was small, and his mind was like a ping pong ball bouncing all over the place. He was troubled by the story in the Canon where the Buddha teaches body contemplation to the monks and then goes into the forest for a retreat. The monks start getting disgusted with their bodies and some of them end up committing suicide or hiring people to kill them. The Buddha comes out and says, “Where is everybody?” He calls the remaining monks together and teaches them that when unskillful states arise in their minds, they should go back to breath meditation. It’ll clear away those mind states in the same way that the first rains of the rainy season clear out the dust of the dry season. This person was troubled by that: How could the Buddha be so ignorant? How could he really be Buddha if he would do something like that?

He’d asked many different Dhamma teachers and had never gotten a satisfactory explanation. So he wanted to ask Ajaan Suwat. We arranged a meeting for him one afternoon at about four. Ajaan Suwat was sitting where I’m sitting right now; I was sitting where the monk next to me is right now; Fred, the guy who was troubled, was sitting right in front of him. If you drew a line between him and Ajaan Suwat, it would go all the way over to the heater over there. We had a woman visiting us, a regular who would come up every weekend. She wanted to see what Ajaan Suwat would have to say, so she was sitting in front of the heater.

So Fred asked the question, “Did Ajaan Suwat know of this story?”

Ajaan Suwat said, “Yes.”

Then Fred asked, “Didn’t it make you have any doubts about the Buddha?”

The word for “doubt” in Thai is sŏng-săi, and that was so far from Ajaan Suwat’s thoughts that he didn’t even hear that word. He heard the word sŏng-săan, which means “to pity.”

So he said, “Yes, I had a lot of pity for the Buddha. He was trying his best to teach people, but there were some people he just couldn’t get through to.”

I had to correct him and say, “No, no, Fred didn’t ask about pity. He asked about doubt.”

“Doubt? Oh, no, never.” Then he focused on Fred. He started talking and he didn’t let up in his talk, which meant there was no room for me to translate. Even I, off to the side, could feel his compassion, it was that palpable. Karen, the woman sitting in front of the heater, said she was pushed against the heater, it was so strong. Fred was sitting there bathed in this compassion and he looked kind of startled. Ajaan Suwat talked like this for about fifteen minutes, and at the end he said, “Well, there’s a lot that you still don’t understand, but I’m afraid this is all the time I have.”

So he left. Fred’s mind was calm for the next three days. The palpable nature of Ajaan Suwat’s compassion was that striking.

That’s one of many good events that have happened here, but we have to remember that, like all dwellings, this dwelling is going to have to fall. In fact, it was originally designed to be taken down. It was put up as a temporary stop-gap measure while we got permission from the county to build something more permanent. As things ended up, what was intended to last for about five years has now lasted for over thirty, but it’s bound to fall apart. We can’t let ourselves get sentimental or nostalgic about it because if we’re nostalgic about something like this, how are you going to feel about your own body when you have to leave it?

The Buddha talks a lot about dwellings. The body is a dwelling. Out of your many lifetimes, each life is like a dwelling: You go from one dwelling, to another, to another. They keep falling down, and you keep building new ones and moving into them. You take on the identity of a being in a particular world, and there you are: a house. This house is built out of very flimsy materials—the form of your body, which is constantly changing; your feelings, perceptions, thought constructs, consciousness—things that are falling apart all the time. So we can’t let ourselves get nostalgic about the body. We look after it so that we can use it to practice, but we have to find a better dwelling inside as part of our path.

The Buddha talks about concentration as a dwelling. You enter into it and you dwell there. Like right now, you enter into the body, focus on the breath, and then you try to stay. As far as you’re concerned right now, the world outside the range of your body is irrelevant. You want to be totally involved in the world inside the body. When you breathe in, where do you feel it? When you breathe out, where do you feel it? If you get really sensitive, you realize you can feel energy flow throughout the whole body.

In the beginning, though, it’s going to be more prominent in some spots than in others, so you focus where it’s clear, and then you ask yourself what rhythm of breathing feels comfortable: Longer, shorter? Heavier, lighter? Faster, slower? Deeper, more shallow? Where can you settle in? You’re trying to make this house into a home, a place where you want to stay.

In the beginning, it’s a place to rest, but as we’ve learned in the past few years, you can also work from home. In fact, the most important work is the work you do as you examine what’s going on in your mind when it’s concentrated. But before you can do that examination you have to get it well-concentrated. Otherwise, the thought of examining it might destroy the concentration itself. So for the time being, just try to make this a comfortable place to be.

You can make it an interesting place as well, because if it’s not interesting, comfort can get dull after a while and you want to start wandering on. And when you wander out of this home, then you’re exposed to all kinds of dangers.

So give the mind things to play with. You can think about the different elements in the body—not the chemical elements, but the elementary properties: fire, the warmth in the body; water, the coolness in the body; you’ve already got the breath, which is the wind property; and then earth, solidity.

Where do you feel these different properties? Can you make the body feel heavier or lighter? Can you make it feel warmer or cooler as you need it? You might try focusing on the perception of warmth. Where right now is the warmest part of your body? Focus there and see if the sensation of warmth gets stronger as you hold that perception of fire in mind. Then allow it to expand. Can you spread the warmth around? This is useful on a cold night like this. On days when it’s hot outside, you can focus on water. Again, the same principle: Where are the coolest sensations inside? Focus on those. Think of them as being water that can spread around the body.

Some people object that this is using your imagination too much, but then the whole point of this is not to see things as they are, it’s to see things as they function, or as the Buddha says, “How they’ve come to be”: the phrase *yathā-bhūta-ñāṇa-dassana.*This phrase is sometimes translated as “knowledge and vision of things as they are,” but there are many passages in the Canon that indicate that that’s not what the Buddha meant. It’s more: What comes from what? See how something arises. The best way to see how things arise is to experiment. You’re going to learn a lot about the power of your perceptions in creating an interesting place to be at home. It’s as if you not only have a comfortable place to stay but also some instruments like microscopes to look carefully at things or different sensors that pick up energies that you ordinarily don’t see in your home.

Scientists talk about how the songs of birds may not really be the way they sound to us because there may be notes they’re singing up above the range of our hearing. Physically, we can’t get to those ranges but mentally there are a lot of things that you ordinarily can’t perceive going on in the body or in the mind until you get the mind really quiet. Then you can perceive them. Your inner senses get more sensitive, and particularly you begin to see how your perceptions shape things.

As the Buddha said, perceptions and feelings shape the mind. So what are the feelings right now that are shaping your mind? What are the perceptions? Can you change them? When he talks about being mindful of feelings, he talks about feelings “not of the flesh” and “feelings of the flesh.” Feelings of the flesh are simple sensory sensations that are pleasant, painful, or neutral. Feelings not of the flesh are things that actually come about because you want to practice. They come about as a result of your intentions. The fact that you’re paying attention and being alert to the breath can create some really pleasant sensations inside. So how do you change the sensations? How do you change your perceptions? And what happens when you do?

This is how you learn about cause and effect, because even this dwelling of concentration that you enter in, that you dwell and remain in, seems very solid, it, too, is going to fall apart. *Ek’aggata—*the quality of having one gathering place: It, too, is going to fall apart. As you stay with it, you realize that you have to keep it going. Without that intention to keep it going, it starts blurring out.

That’s when the Buddha recommends that you start looking at ways of taking this house apart: demolishing this house, even your passion for concentration. You see that it has its origination in the mind, but it also passes away, and you have to keep causing it again and again. You see the allure in that really is a very comfortable place to be, and it’s a much more solid comfort and sense of well-being or ease, pleasure, than you can get from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations, but it does have its drawbacks. It’s like a house that’s constantly falling down, and you have to constantly keep it in repair.

I think of my father when I was young. He was a real handyman around the house, and every weekend there was always some project to work on because there was always something going wrong. Some people will live in a house and just let things go wrong until they get really bad. In his case, though, he was constantly keeping it up. If you’re really sensitive to having a house, you realize how much maintenance it requires. So it’s not just a comfortable place to be, it’s a place you have to keep fixing. When you see that, the mind tends to finally say, “Well, maybe what the Buddha says about dispassion for fabrications is a good idea, worth listening to. Maybe it would be better to find something unfabricated.”

So you look around. You don’t want to leave concentration because the fabrications of an unconcentrated mind are even more burdensome. So you think about that analogy the Buddha gave that time he was asked how he crossed over the flood. He said, “By not pushing forward and not staying in place.”

In other words, you don’t stay in the state of concentration where you are, but you don’t try to go anyplace else. Within time and space those are the only two alternatives: staying and moving.

So what’s a third alternative that doesn’t involve time and space? That’s the question. It’s only when you’ve developed your sensitivities really well that you can see the answer. That’s when you don’t have any dwellings at all.

The Buddha does, however, sometimes talk about how the enlightened person dwells in emptiness: empty of greed, aversion, and delusion. But it’s not really a dwelling, because again and again the texts say that the enlightened person is everywhere released, fixated nowhere. The image they give is a light beam that doesn’t land anywhere. Look up in the sky at night. It looks dark to us, but there are lots of light beams going back and forth, back and forth throughout space. When we have something like the Moon, it’ll reflect the light that’s there. But it’s not the case that there’s no light next to the Moon. It’s there, too, just that we don’t see it because there’s nothing to reflect it. That’s the image the Buddha gives of being everywhere released, established nowhere.

So where we’re going is outside of dwellings, which means that we have to have the right attitude to the dwellings that we take on, to try to create this inner dwelling of concentration, realizing that it, too, is going to fall apart just like the body is going to fall apart someday. But you can get some good out of it in the meantime. The fact that the sala is going to be removed doesn’t remove all the good things that happened here. They’re part of our karmic inheritance for those of us who’ve been here and done good here and experienced the goodness of others here. So we appreciate the goodness that’s been done here, we appreciate the fact that the sala has provided us with a place, but we can’t get nostalgic or attached.

Years back, when we were building the chedi, which is a spired monument, at the monastery, Wat Dhammasathit, we didn’t hire people. We had volunteer workers. Ajaan Fuang’s students from Bangkok would come out every weekend; the monks and some of the local people would work during the week. When it was all done, a group of the people who had been working on it were sitting around talking about how much merit they anticipated from building the chedi. Ajaan Fuang walked by and said, “Watch out. If you’re attached to the chedi, you’re going to come back and be reborn here, and who knows what kind of animal would be reborn in a chedi.”

You do good and then let the good nourish you, but you don’t get nostalgic about it, because you always want to keep on doing more good.

Our hope is that we can build a new sala and that more people will continue doing good there until it, too, has to fall down—but the goodness stays solid. Make that your inner dwelling until the mind reaches the point where it doesn’t need a dwelling at all.