Beyond Soundbitten Dhamma
September 10, 2024

There’s a habit we all have, which is to try to reduce the Dhamma to a few easy sound bites, a few very basic principles: “It’s all about emptiness”; “It’s all about letting go”; “It’s all about compassion”; “It’s all about change”; “It’s all about acceptance.”

For ease of memorization, it’s good to have a few very basic principles like that—but the Dhamma is a lot more complex. You learn this when you actually live with someone who exemplifies the Dhamma.

Ajaan Maha Boowa talks about living with Ajaan Mun—how he could never really predict what Ajaan Mun would do.

Ajaan Mun would encourage the monks in different tudong practices, like eating only one meal a day, eating only the food that you get for your alms round. But then, if he saw that you were getting proud about that kind of practice, he’d do a little something to cut the pride.

Like Ajaan Maha Boowa: He was quite proud of the fact that he would accept only the food that he got in his alms round. That’s all he would eat. But every now and then, Ajaan Mun would come in, as Ajaan Maha Boowa was sitting and contemplating his food before he ate it, and slip a little something into his bowl, saying, “This came from some people who came late. Have some compassion for them.”

So Ajaan Maha Boowa realized that he had to look at things in an all-around way—not just be focused on one thing at a time.

I’ve told you the story about Ajaan Fuang talking to a young monk who was scheduled to disrobe. His parents and his fiancée had come to pick him up. They were going to take him back to Bangkok where he would disrobe.

That night he gave a Dhamma talk on how, when we come to this world, we don’t come alone. We have responsibilities to our parents, to those who’ve raised us, to those who’ve looked after us.

The talk got me to thinking. A few days after that monk had left and disrobed, I started thinking about my responsibilities to my family. I mentioned that to Ajaan Fuang. He said, “We come to this world alone. We’re not beholden to anybody.”

Two very different teachings, but they were both right for the time and place.

This is something you have to keep in mind as you’re looking at the Buddha’s teachings. We can’t take our guidance from sound-bitten Dhamma, where it gets reduced to just a few basic principles, without any circumspection, without any sense of time and place, without any sense of what’s right for right now—like the whole issue of how to judge your practice.

The Buddha talks about looking at your actions, seeing the results they get, and if you see that you’ve made a mistake, do something to counteract it. Make sure you don’t make that mistake again.

If you see that you intended to do something skillful and you actually did it skillfully and the results were good, he says to take pride in that, take joy in that—that’s your energy for the practice.

There are other places, though, where he says there’s very little that you can judge or he’s very specific about what you can and cannot judge.

He talks about how when you’re using an adze—which is kind of like a hammer, with a blade instead of a hammerhead—you know the handle is going to wear down. But you never know exactly when it’s going to happen. You can’t measure from one day to the next how much it’s worn down. But you know it’s going to be wearing down, and one day it will wear out totally. He says the practice is like that.

It makes it sound like you shouldn’t be judging your practice at all, or that it’s something you can’t judge. But actually, the Buddha applies that image to a very specific case, which is when you’re trying to figure out how much longer you’ve got before you reach the noble attainments. You can’t really know.

It’s not as if you see a little glimmer of the deathless a day or two before. When things come together just right, they come together just right, and that’s it. It’s radically different from anything you’ve experienced before. So that you can’t judge.

As for judging other people, there’s a passage where it makes it sound like you shouldn’t be judging anybody at all.

But again, the Buddha is saying something specific: Don’t judge other people’s noble attainments, especially at the moment of their death. Because, sometimes, somebody dies and their life may not have been all that inspiring up to that point, but somehow they get it all together just before they die.

There’s one case where one of the Buddha’s relatives died and he said the relative died as a stream-enterer. Another one of his relatives said, “Well, if he can do it, anybody can do it.”

As the Buddha said, there are a lot of things you don’t know about other people. That’s something you don’t judge.

But you do judge people as to whether or not you benefit from associating with them. Notice, you’re not judging them according to their worth as individuals, in and of themselves. You just ask yourself, “When I associate with people like this, where does it take me? Does it take me to a good place or does it pull me back? Which people help me grow?” That’s a valid thing that you should judge other people about.

As for gauging your practice: There are times when you do have to give yourself encouragement; and other times, as the Buddha says, you have to make sure you don’t rest content with skillful qualities. That, in fact, he said, was the key to his awakening.

You look at his life. He practiced with two teachers and mastered their teaching. In one case, he actually outdid the teacher, and the teacher was going to place him in a position of teacher for the whole community. But the Buddha realized that this attainment he’d reached—the state of neither perception or non-perception—was not the deathless. He wasn’t going to settle for anything less. So, in that case, he made sure that he was not content with his practice.

Then there’s this case when he taught Rahula, “When you’ve see that you’ve done something skillful, take joy in that. But then continue training. Don’t rest right there.”

As for the question of comparing yourself with other people: It’s very rarely the case that’s really useful. We’re not here in an awakening race, seeing who’s going to get there first. If you’re going to compete with anybody, compete with yourself. Ask yourself, “Is my practice actually making me a better person?”

Think of that question the Buddha has you ask every day: “Days and nights, fly past, fly past. What am I becoming right now?” What you’re becoming depends on your actions. So what are you doing, and what kind of person are you becoming as a result of what you’re doing?

Maybe you’re becoming more compassionate. Maybe you’re becoming more mindful, more circumspect—or less. That’s something you’ve really got to look into. If you don’t gauge your practice in that way, you have no way of self-correcting, to make sure that you stay on the path. So you compare yourself with yourself.

As for judging other people, that’s useful only when you look at other people’s behavior and you see something that’s really unattractive, uninspiring, and you ask yourself, “Do I have that in my behavior?” If you realize you do, you say, “Okay, this is what it looks like from outside. Is that the kind of person I want to be?” If the answer is No, okay, you have work to do. So focus on the work. Don’t focus on how bad that other person is. Leave that issue behind.

You’re in training, and one of the aspects of being in training is that you have a privilege that a lot of people don’t have. So you show some understanding for those who are not in training. They’ve missed an opportunity that you’ve been fortunate enough, through your good karma, to be able to take advantage of. They don’t have that opportunity. So you should have some compassion for them.

And you want to make sure that you’re a good example to others, so that the training is attractive to them. Then they might want to take on the training themselves.

There’s a lot to think about when you’re going to be circumspect in your practice. Try not to reduce things to soundbites. When the Dhamma gets sound-bitten, it’s just shredded into little pieces. It becomes kind of dumb. And we’re practicing the Dhamma to become more intelligent.

There was a book written one time about the Buddha called, *The Intelligent Heart. *That seems to sum up the Dhamma pretty well. It’s intelligent not only in the way of thinking things through and analyzing things. It’s intelligent in all the good qualities of the heart: skillful compassion, skillful shame, skillful pride, skillful modesty. All these qualities of the heart: You want to learn how to master them as skills. That requires having a good, strong sense of time and place and what your heart and mind need right now. So learn how to read your mind. Read your heart.

And have a sense of the different options that are available to you. The Buddha didn’t teach just one thing. He taught suffering and the end of suffering. That’s two right there. And each of those teachings has a lot of ramifications—the analysis of what suffering is, that you can comprehend it and the whole path to the end of suffering.

To take just one factor out of the path: The Buddha said that if there was some way he could live to a hundred years and every day for a hundred years people would put questions to him about right mindfulness—then, even allowing for the fact that people would have to rest and eat, take care of their bodily needs, but otherwise they’d be asking questions just about right mindfulness—even at the end of a hundred years, they wouldn’t have come to the end of his knowledge about it.

The Dhamma has that many ins and outs.

So don’t let your vision of the Dhamma get sound-bitten. Realize that every teaching has its limits.

It’s one of Ajaan Lee’s tests: Whatever insight you get, ask yourself, “Exactly how far does this insight go? Can you apply it everywhere? Or does it apply only to certain things? And where does its opposite have its truth, its role to play?” When you think in those terms, that’s when your practice is all around, because your vision is all around.

Think of that epithet of the Buddha, the all-around eye: Tthat’s the quality you want to develop.